Yup it’s grooming. It doesn’t actually matter about why he’s doing it, as in, you don’t have to play ‘guess the baddness’ before you defend yourself and your DS from harm.
Time to get your defenders up. No more putting your friend first. You put your son first, and that means no drama for his mummy and no disturbances in his life of any kind. No mixed messages and absolutely no grooming.
I’m a single mother who has to rely on others a lot to help out with DS for health reasons. This means I have to be totally on it where our boundaries are concerned and where DS understanding of boundaries and safety rules are concerned. Abusers look out for homes where the fences aren’t put up well. Sorry to use a fence analogy!!! But they do take advantage of weaknesses already there. A child isn’t protected if there’s a dirty great hole in the fences around them... an abuser can walk straight on through and it’s easy pickings for him. Sickening but true.
So even if this mans grooming is ‘only’ for the purposes of restoring his misogynistic sense of power and control after you so meanly took it away from him by scuppering his hostile takeover bid of your sons party.., that’s NOT ‘ah well, no harm done’.
Just the act of grooming alone does alot of harm because it knocks down your child’s / your families boundaries and safe defenses. It leaves your child open and defenseless against the next predator who comes along.
That is why it is dangerous.
You need to take action to correct the damage in your sons understanding of what’s right / wrong, even if you don’t do much else. A man asked him to keep a secret and you sanctioned that behaviour. So mummy says keeping secrets is okay now.,.. remember how mummy wanted you to keep a secret for me before? Well I’ve got another secret for you to keep... you see how dangerous this is right?!
Suddenly it’s not just about a birthday present anymore is it?
Please don’t sleep walk your child into danger. Abusers groom the family as well as the child. And look, you were already silenced into letting him take control of this situation with your child and you let him engage your son in inappropriate boundary risking behaviour (sorry!). So, although you feel horrible about it, in his head, he won today. And he did win, because your child now has diluted messages about safeguarding, unless you step in quickly.
My ds has known since he was tiny that we never, ever keep secrets, and that if an adult EVER asks him to keep a secret that means that he must come and tell me immediately because that is WRONG. No secrets, ever. No exceptions. We used to make it lighthearted but I’d get him to give me the answer ... so what happens if someone says ‘hey DS, let’s keep a secret...’, and he’d laugh at the idea of it being a kind of ‘secret code’ as it were, because he got to do the exact opposite, and run to mummy and tell me straight away. As he got a bit older, I’m sure I’ve been very annoying in (politely!) changing friends language to ‘surprises’ when they’ve said ‘secrets’ in front of me meaning to prepare a birthday surprise etc, but DS needed a simple rule to follow, not ‘some secrets are good, and some are bad!’.
It proved very needed as someone did do something awful to DS. And an hour later DS came and told me. Much later I asked him why he’d come and shared it so quickly and bravely with mummy, and he looked at me slightly like I was an idiot and said ‘because you always told me to mummy, so I knew what to do’ (like durr)... it was **cking hideous but all the way through that next few months of awfulness, I was told that DSs prompt sharing saved him from so much worse, because it was still in the grooming type of territory / crossing over, but the first properly ‘not ok’ thing to happen. I thank God that DS took me at my word and he got those rules so well into his head. It could so easily have been so much worse.
The thing is, you don’t think it is that important to do right now, always later, life gets in the way, or you assume they’ll know what to do, ... right up until it suddenly matters one hell of a lot. But they’re young and grown ups are confusing, and they need us to show them all the time what the rules are to be safe and sound as we can make them, in small and simple and consistent ways.
So Id say, please please do whatever you need to to shut off a relationship between you and this man, and vitally, your man and your son.
I’d be tempted to text your friend and explain what has happened and breaking this shared secret he’s trying to build between you. However, I understand if you want to avoid escalating the situation.
‘I was taken aback by your husband asking my son to keep the present a secret, I’m really confused about why he’d do that and about whether I’m even supposed to tell you. To be honest, as a police officer especially, I’d have thought he’d know better than to start asking any child to keep secrets for him. The whole visit felt rather odd so I’m not comfortable with him coming round on his own anymore. Sure you’ll understand, etc.’