Please teach your kids!!

When I was growing up, I was taught to ride my bike with traffic and stay on the side of the road.  I see so many kids that wait for a car to pass them and then switch lanes and ride against traffic.  I always get pissed because it’s just unsafe.  And I get pissed at their parents for not caring enough to teach them right.

Tonight, I was coming home from picking my kids up.  I was doing about 50 mph as I came up on a kid on a bike.  I let go of the gas to let the car traveling towards me to pass him so I could merge over into his lane to pass the biker.  And no sooner then the car passed, the biker tried to cut across the lanes and I hit him.  I remember slamming on the brakes, and I remember seeing his clothes through the hole in my windshield right in front of me.  I got the car stopped and off the road and all I remember is my kids crying in the back seat.  I told them to stay there and got out and went to check on the kid in the street.  He was bleeding pretty good but not horribly bad.  I can still picture that color red on the pavement coming from his head.  It’s not the red you think it would be.  He got up and I told him to lay back down as I was trying to call 9-1-1.

In the end, they put him in an ambulance and took him away.  He was coherent and like I said, he stood up so I don’t think he was doing horribly bad for being hit by a car doing 40mph.

I still don’t know how I feel.  I feel bad for the kid, who come to find out, was 20 years old.  But on the other hand I’m pissed because he turned his bike right in front of me without even looking.  I feel bad for his parents, but on the other hand, I’m pissed they didn’t teach him any better.  So all in all, I feel like crap because I’m pissed at him and I feel bad for being pissed at him.  I thank God that it wasn’t truly a kid, because I’m still a little shaken by it.  I can’t imagine if I had hit a kid who was 10 or 12 years old.

I just hope my kids, who are asleep now, learned a lesson from this.  And I hope they aren’t scarred for life for what they saw.  Samantha had some trouble going to sleep, and she was coughing from all the crying she had done.  But I won’t be able to get the image of them looking at me with that scared/crying look when I went back to check on them after checking on the biker.  Those looks will haunt my dreams for awhile.