My eldest doesn’t live at home (very complicated), he is autistic and lives in supported living near his dad, and his dad has been supportive mixed with incredibly unhelpful (unhelpfulness reported by social workers, not my potentially biased opinion), but my son recognises the support his dad has given him over the last year, and so do I.
Background - dad was abusive towards me mainly, the kids also to some extent. I left 10 years ago, ds1 chose not to see dad for a number of years, his younger siblings saw dad supervised at contact centre, then supervised by family members, then unsupervised for a while before some incidents made me stop contact and go back to court which took ages and ended with him being granted unsupervised contact again which went on for a couple more years very infrequently (due to dad not me) with a few more incidents and then younger kids have in the last 2 years decided not to see him as they are now young teens and able to decide for themselves. The last incident before they decided to stop seeing him involved him screaming abuse at me at pick up in front of them.
Theres a lot more but I don’t want to make this too long. In a nutshell DS1 because abusive towards me and younger siblings as he became an older teen and eventually he couldn’t live in the family home safely with us any more which is why he’s in the supported living. He has severe mental health issues.
I have been aware over the years that dad has spoken inappropriately (imo) to all the kids about the circs of the break up, accused me of lying to police, lying in court etc - unfortunately while he was convicted of assaulting a female police officer in custody, there was not enough evidence regarding me.
Ds1 told me last night that dad had told him everything, that he knows everything that happened and that it’s terrible ‘that I’m not letting the younger ones see dad, it’s so awful for dad, that I’ve lied to the younger ones about dad etc. He asked me to tell him my side since he’s an adult now. I had Ds2 beside me at the time so I said I couldn’t speak then.
In general my policy has been never to speak badly of their dad to them. More lately when the younger ones have repeated lies their dad has told them in the past, I’ve corrected them factually without going into detail, but that is all.
What should I do if/when Ds1 asks me again? He is an adult but I dont want to collude in putting him in the middle. I don’t know exactly what his dad has told him, but I don’t want to tell him all the details and frankly, since he values his dads support I don’t want to tell him anything bad about him at all really.
But Ds1 had sent me a message before he called saying I wasn’t his mum anymore, and started the call by saying it would be the last time I spoke to him because dad had told him ‘everything’
I called him back later in the evening and he didn’t mention it at all because he was deep in his special interests at the time so we just spoke about those.
DS1 does speak to his siblings from time to time, and he tends to tell stuff even if he’s been asked not to, so I think it’s likely that anything I did tell him would eventually be heard by them.
What shall I do?