Driver’s Ed

For a few weeks, the dumbest thing I ever had to do was driver training. It seemed like so many things we were learning were common sense. Wear a seatbelt, don’t drink and drive, don’t drive high, stay off your phone when driving, stop at stop signs, and look both ways at an intersection. It was all stupid and my almost sixteen-year-old brain could simply not comprehend why my mom had to pay nearly four hundred dollars for me to be told many things I already knew. Driver’s safety was a joke to me until it wasn’t.

Our driver’s training teachers saw all the little annoyed faces of teenagers, fresh out of school who were tired of listening to the same thing over and over again. He woke up all the sleeping kids and showed us videos of real car crashes. The drivers were all the idiots who were not familiar with the common sense piece of driving. The people involved in the crashes were safe but it was still scary to watch. I knew right then that I would never be a stupid driver, and with that logic, I passed the class. A few months later I took my driving test and aced it, after my third try. I was a real driver.

My license could not have come at a better time because my mom had broken her wrist and couldn’t drive. I had my license for two months now and I had just turned 17 a few days before my mom asked me to pick up my brothers from school. I was elated to be able to pick them up from school like a mini adult. Driver’s safety didn’t matter that much to me up to this point. It should’ve been considering the fact that a few years prior, a girl I grew up with was killed in a car accident. Her killer was a reckless teenage driver, a friend of her sister. I wish it would have mattered to the driver who committed a hit-and-run on my grandma that left her barely escaping with her life. It should have mattered to the drunk driver who killed an alumni from my school just a few months after graduating. I never drove recklessly, fortunately, I had common sense but some things just didn’t click in my head and I was slowly being conditioned to believe that minor things like cell phone usage behind the wheel were not as important as people made it seem.

I had forgotten the way to the kids’ school. It had been years since I had been there and I had to go to the back of the school to pick them up. I tried to get there with no GPS but the closer I got to the school, the more lost I got. I sat at a red light, not knowing if I should go straight or turn left. Cars honked at me, creepy strangers stared at me. I was lost in a familiar land that became eerily foreign to me so I did the only logical thing that a seventeen-year-old whose frontal lobe isn’t quite developed yet would do. I got on my phone in the middle of the road to try and get directions. I thought I was safe but as I scraped past cars that I wrongfully jumped in front of and picked up trash cans on streets I couldn’t remember driving to I realized I was in danger.

I called my mom and she gave me directions to their school and I saw the faces of the two boys I loved more than anything in the world. Being a big sister is like being a mom to kids you did not birth and after looking at those tiny smiles of my babies who were getting in my back seat I knew I could never put them in danger as I did myself. This time I turned on my GPS before pulling off. I connected my phone to Bluetooth so I would have no reason to touch it. I looked both ways at intersections and stopped at every stop sign. I refused to drive even a mile over the speed limit even when the hungry little boys in my backset began to protest. Nothing would ever stop me from keeping them safe and if that meant I had to be the lame driver who obeyed every bitter traffic law then so be it. I love my brothers and I knew I had to make sure they made it home safe. When we got inside and they gave me hugs and kisses before starting their homework I knew that I had to drive safely so that I could make it home safely to them every day.

Somewhere out there is a big sister, a mom, a brother, an aunt, a grandparent, or a best friend who has people that they want to come home to every day. I drive safely so that I can do my part in making sure they can make it home so that little faces like my brothers can give hugs and kisses to the people who keep them safe on and off the road. Those hugs, kisses, and smiles are worth every honk I get from drivers who urge me to speed through an intersection. Those hugs, kisses, and smiles are worth every “you don’t have to stop there’s no one there”, I get from passengers in my car. Those hugs, kisses, and smiles are worth every single car that passes around me when I drive the speed limit because in order to give my brothers the world, I have to be in it.

Driver Ed isn’t so stupid anymore.