Am I wrong for threatening to call the cops on a group of bikers who showed up at my foster home unannounced to see my daughter?
I’ve been a licensed foster parent for three years and right now I have custody of a seven-year-old girl named Destiny who has been through things no kid should ever have to describe out loud. She’s been with me for nine months. She calls me Mama. Next Tuesday she has to sit in a courtroom and testify against the person who hurt her, and she hasn’t slept through the night in two weeks.
My friend Tammy from my support group told me about this organization – bikers who escort kids to court so they feel safe. Big guys on motorcycles who stand with the child, sit in the courtroom, make sure the kid knows nobody can touch them. Tammy gave my number to the chapter president without asking me first.
Last Saturday morning I was getting Destiny dressed for her therapy appointment. She was already on edge because we’d been doing prep work about the courtroom. Then I heard it.
Motorcycles. A LOT of them.
I looked out the front window and there were nine bikes pulling into my driveway. Nine. Leather vests, bandanas, boots. Destiny grabbed my leg so hard her fingernails broke skin through my jeans.
She was SHAKING.
A guy who had to be six-four got off the lead bike and started walking toward my front door. I stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind me. I told him he needed to stop right there.
He put his hands up and said, “Ma’am, we’re here for Destiny. We’re the good guys.”
I told him I didn’t care who he was. I said nobody called him here, nobody cleared this with me, and he just scared the hell out of my kid. He said Tammy told them it was fine and they wanted to introduce themselves before court day so Destiny would feel comfortable.
I said, “You brought NINE GROWN MEN on motorcycles to a foster child’s home without warning and you think that’s making her comfortable?”
He got quiet. Then another guy stepped forward and said, “Look, we do this all the time. The kids love us. You’re overreacting.”
That word. Overreacting. About a child who flinches when someone walks too heavy down a hallway.
I told them if they weren’t off my property in sixty seconds I was calling 911. The big guy’s face changed. He said, “We’re trying to HELP your daughter.” I said, “She is not your daughter. She is MINE. And right now she is hiding behind my couch because of you.”
My friends and family are split. Tammy is furious with me, says I humiliated good people who volunteer their time for kids. My caseworker said I was within my rights but that the organization has an incredible reputation and I should reconsider for Destiny’s sake. Even my mom said I was too harsh.
But here’s the thing nobody knows yet. After they left, it took me forty-five minutes to get Destiny out from behind the couch. And when I finally did, she looked up at me and said something that made my chest crack open.
She said, “Mama, did he send them?”
Meaning HIM. The man she has to face in court on Tuesday.
I held her so tight. And that’s when I made a decision about Tuesday that I haven’t told anyone yet. Not Tammy, not my caseworker, not my mother. I picked up my phone and I called –
What I Did After I Put Her to Bed
The chapter president. Gary.
His number was still on my screen from when I’d looked it up after they left, half ready to file a complaint and half something else I couldn’t name yet. I sat at my kitchen table with the house quiet and Destiny finally asleep down the hall, one of those hard, exhausted sleeps that come after a bad day. The kind where you check on them twice because the silence feels wrong.
Gary picked up on the second ring. He sounded like he expected it to be bad news.
I didn’t apologize. I want to be clear about that. I did not apologize for protecting my kid on my porch that morning. But I told him what Destiny had said when she finally came out from behind the couch. I told him word for word. Did he send them.
Gary didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “Oh.”
Just that. Oh.
And something in the way he said it made me think he’d done this long enough to understand exactly what that question meant. What it costs a seven-year-old to ask it. What kind of world she’s been living in where that’s the first thing her brain goes to when she sees a group of men coming to her door.
I asked him how this normally works. The actual process. Not the version Tammy described, not the version the second guy on the bike had snapped at me about. The real version.
He told me.
The Part Tammy Left Out
Turns out there’s a whole intake process. A coordinator who contacts the foster parent or guardian first, always. A phone call, then a meeting somewhere neutral, a library or a McDonald’s, somewhere the child can see the volunteers in regular clothes before they ever see the leather. Sometimes it takes two or three meetings. Sometimes the kid decides they don’t want the escort and that’s the end of it. Nobody pushes.
Tammy had skipped all of that. She’d called Gary herself and told him I was on board, told him Destiny was excited about motorcycles, told him Saturday morning worked fine. She’d built a whole story and handed it to him and he’d taken it in good faith because why would a woman from a foster parent support group lie about something like that.
“She told us the little girl had been asking about us specifically,” Gary said. “That she’d seen a news story.”
Destiny doesn’t watch the news. She watches a cartoon about a dog who runs a fire station.
I sat there at my kitchen table and I didn’t say anything about Tammy. I’m still not sure what to do about Tammy. That’s a separate thing I’m turning over and not ready to deal with yet.
What I said was: “Is there still time to do this right? Before Tuesday?”
Sunday Afternoon at the McDonald’s on Clement Street
Gary brought two guys. Just two. No bikes. They drove a regular pickup truck and they wore jeans and regular jackets and one of them, a man named Dennis who had a gray beard and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, brought a paper bag with Happy Meals in it because Gary had asked me beforehand if that was okay.
I told Destiny we were meeting some friends of mine for lunch. That was true enough.
She was suspicious. She’s always suspicious of new people, which is the right instinct for a kid who’s had her history, and I don’t try to talk her out of it. We sat down across from Gary and Dennis and a third guy named Phil who barely said ten words the whole time but kept making this one specific face whenever Destiny said something funny, this face like he was trying very hard not to crack a smile, and she noticed. Kids always notice.
She ate half her fries and watched them. She asked Gary why his arms were so big. He told her he used to work construction and now he just ate too much. She asked Dennis what the glasses on his head were for. He said he needed them to read but he kept forgetting he owned them. She thought that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, and she said so, and he agreed with her completely.
Phil still hadn’t said much. Destiny looked at him for a long time.
“How come you don’t talk?” she said.
Phil looked at her. “I talk when I got something worth saying.”
She thought about that. Then she nodded like that was a reasonable policy.
By the end of it she’d eaten all her fries and most of mine and she’d shown Gary a video on my phone of her cat doing something stupid, and when we got up to leave she asked Dennis if he was going to be there on Tuesday.
He said that was up to her.
She looked at the floor for a second. Then she said yeah, okay, he could come.
The Night Before Tuesday
I didn’t sleep. That’s not unusual for me lately. I’d been up past midnight most nights for two weeks running, lying there listening for Destiny, listening for anything, running through every possible thing that could go wrong in that courtroom.
Around 1 a.m. I got up and went to check on her and she was awake too. Just lying there in the dark with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
I got into bed next to her. It’s a twin bed, barely fits us both. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. After a while she put her hand on my arm.
We stayed like that until about three in the morning, when she finally fell asleep. I stayed another hour just to be sure.
Tuesday
They were waiting in the parking lot. Gary and Dennis and Phil and three others I hadn’t met, all of them in regular clothes, no bikes, just standing near their cars in the early morning gray. When we pulled in, Dennis raised one hand. That was it. No production.
Destiny got out of my car and stood there for a second looking at them.
Then she walked over to Dennis and stood next to him. Not holding his hand, not hugging him. Just. Next to him. Like she’d decided he was where she was going to stand.
We went inside.
I’m not going to describe what happened in the courtroom. I’m not going to write about what she said or what he looked like or what his lawyer did or how long it took. Some things don’t belong on the internet. What I’ll say is she did it. She sat in that chair and she said what she needed to say, and the whole time Dennis was in the back row where she could see him, and every time she looked up he was doing that thing, that face, trying not to smile.
She made it.
After, in the hallway, Phil crouched down in front of her. First time I’d seen him move fast.
He said, “You got something worth saying?”
She thought about it. Then she said, “I want a milkshake.”
Phil stood up and looked at Gary. “We’re getting milkshakes.”
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know Saturday Morning
I was right to step onto that porch. I was right to put myself between nine strangers and my kid. I would do it again without thinking twice, and I don’t care who that makes angry.
But I’ve been turning over the word overreacting for a week now, not because I think the guy on the bike was right, but because I know what it feels like to be so locked into protection mode that you stop being able to see the off-ramp. I’ve been in that mode for nine months. Maybe longer. Probably longer.
Tammy and I haven’t talked since Saturday. I don’t know what that friendship looks like going forward. She did something that wasn’t hers to do, told a story that wasn’t hers to tell, and a seven-year-old spent forty-five minutes behind a couch because of it. I’m not ready to sort through all of that yet.
My caseworker called Tuesday evening. I told her how it went. She was quiet for a second and then she said, “How are you doing?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that.
Destiny is asleep right now. It’s the first night in two weeks she went down without a fight. I sat in the hallway outside her door for a while just listening to her breathe.
She called me Mama again tonight.
That’s enough. That’s plenty.
—
If this one hit close to home, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
If you’re interested in more stories about bikers showing up in unexpected places, check out how My Supervisor Called the Veterans Walking a Seven-Year-Old Into Court a “Gang”, or when I Pulled Up to the Courthouse and the Parking Lot Was Already Full of Bikers. And for a different take on biker encounters, read about the time I Called a Man “Deadbeat Biker Trash” to His Face in Open Court. Then His Attorney Started Talking.
