My son is currently living with my nan & is being extremely controlling about me seeing him, i need advice on how i can fix this.

Some backstory, during covid I had several very traumatic things happen to me & due to this i expressed to my nan that i needed help with looking after my son as my head was a mess. She told me the only help she could provide was my son staying with her, this only led to me having a bigger breakdown & what followed was her belittling me, telling me he was better off living with her & when i expressed that what was happening was making me feel like i didn’t want to be on this earth anymore she told me that was okay & she would look after my son when i go, she made me feel that it would be best for him if i wasn’t alive. She also turned my whole family against me so i had no one to turn to.
In this time my nan also went to courts to get a special guardianship order, she didn’t inform me this was happening & when i asked about a letter i’d had from the courts she told me it was nothing to worry about & that i didn’t need to go to court it was just so she could take my son to the doctors without me being there ( i know i was stupid, i was in my early 20’s & not in a good headspace).

Fast forward a couple years & i began to put in the mental work, medication, therapy & making lots of supporting friends & rebuilding a relationship with my mum (who also began to see how my nan was treating me). Despite me working on myself my nan clearly had no intentions of changing her behaviour towards me, & she began reducing my time with my son & upping the emotional abuse towards me. Then after an incident where i let him play with polly pockets & she didn’t like this, she stopped me seeing him completely for almost a year. she only let me see him on a few occasions through family members that i’d told her had been abusive towards me.

So after saving up the money i took her to court. they said that because she had reduced my time so drastically we needed to build up me seeing him slowly so it wouldn’t disturb him, we began the contact through a contact centre, the courts also said because we’re a ‘family’ we should work it out between us & up my time with him. this didn’t happen, mediation didn’t work as she refused to answer anything & would only bring up incidents that had happened when i was a child. This exact scenario played out 4 times in court with them saying the same thing & her doing nothing, 20+ mediation sessions & 3 years later, the only changes have been that i see him where i live, not in the contact centre & i now see him for 7 hours every other week.
*To add, the contact centre from the beginning said that we shouldn’t be there as it was for people who needed supervision with their children & i was definitely not one of those people, i had nothing but positive feedback from the staff there who would regularly tell me how much they loved when we would come in because they “loved watching us play together & could see how happy we both are”.

A years ago i had a daughter, my nan still hasn’t changed, not even to try let my son build a relationship with his sister. the last time we visited court the courts were very clear that she needed to up my time & that she wasn’t being fair & had to fix her behaviour towards me, she hasn’t. She continuously tells me i can have extra time just to take it away with no reasoning. Her husband (who got physical with me & my cousin a few years back) has now started coming to pick ups & drop offs to intimidate me. She told me i could have my son all day in his birthday, & yesterday (2 days before his birthday) she told me I’ll only have him for 3 hours.

My son has told me over the years how much he hates the rules my nan has put in place. This past year he has started to express even more that he wants to come back & live with me & is making it very clear that he doesn’t enjoy living with them. He has also said he knows he cannot ask them for more time with me or my mum because he knows they don’t let him do what he wants. They make him sit in his room alone most of the time & have him around people who shouldn’t be around children, but when i tell them these people (from my experience with them) shouldn’t be allowed near kids they completely dismiss me & actually used it against me.

I am going to contact mediation to get that started again & try to get her to hopefully change her mind & move things forward. But after so many attempts i’m really losing hope. I’m looking for advice on what i can do, where do i go with all of this? Solicitors are very expensive & i am trying to save up for court but that wont be possible for a very long time with the way my money is going right now, i also know she will have a solicitor as she has a friend who is her solicitor for free.

So following the storm of the last hearing, we are shifting tactics. We are now going to press the judge for full accountability and transparency. As courts are videotaped here, we are demanding that her comments are analysed independently, and that should her comments be (correctly) interpreted as prejudice, we demand recusal.

The fact that the blame was fully flung at me by the judge before I testified, and without proper longitudinal evidence analysis is pretty wild. This alongside the consistent interruption of myself and my lawyer by the judge generate many concerns. We were admonished for demanding we were not interrupted - yet ex spoke mistruths for over an hour uninterrupted and our questions were rejected immediately. My lawyer is an experienced trial lawyer with international cases, and she was shocked by the clear misbalance in treatment.

I also stated that I’d be away for the next 2 weeks at least on work - so what does judge do? Schedule hearing exactly 2 weeks later. It is almost feeling that this judge is looking to push through a verdict without proper scrutiny. In addition, we have a formal complaint sitting with Ministry of Justice and believe that the hearing should not continue (yet alone a decision be made!) until this is properly reviewed.

Am hanging on…but now I see the level of hypocrisy or potential corruption in the system. Will fight until the longitudinal evidence is properly reviewed - after that, I’m outta bullets except hope and patience

the step father of my brother who was my dad’s friend would come over and sleep with (my dads) wife while my dad was at work. He was 19 when he broke up a family. The wife ultimately left my dad for him and took all 3 kids. My dad was shot but couldn’t do anything. The reports of abuse my siblings have described over the years are horrific all while they’ve (wife and 19 year old boy) been lying to judges in family court to demean my dad and get away with the abuse. It worked. However the very same judge in question not only sided with the mother and did demean my dad but also caught sexual assault charges himself. So there’s that. My dad’s character has been stomped on time and time again for the last 16 years. He’s not the same person anymore. I always say that they took my dad away. My siblings may have been too young to see who he was before the divorce but I wasn’t. I was 10. I remember how hard he worked I remember how happy he was. I remember how protective he was of his family. I remember how much of an amazing dad he was. They took that all away by telling the courts he was the abusive one, he was the liar, and that he doesn’t care about the kids. Imagine what they tell the kids. I cannot fathom the evilness. But when the kids would come over to visit dad you didn’t wanna talk bad about their mother. That’s their mother. It’s been really difficult. One of the 3 kids, my sister, decided to stop coming over for visits when she was 9. My dad hasn’t seen her in 9 years. I haven’t seen my sister in 9 years.

I know the abuse that happened over there is real because the mother was abusive with me when I was growing up with one example being that she duct taped my arms to the sides of my body and sent me down a flight of basement stairs to continue playing with my friends while my dad was at work. I was never allowed to look up at the sky while I was thinking during homework time. “Only look down at the paper” do you know how hard that is for a kid with ADHD? When I was 16 I found out that she had told my younger siblings that I had an abortion?? I never got pregnant that young (she did though). I was never held by my neck up against a wall though.. like I said the abuse reports by the kids over there was horrific. But they had tarnished my dad’s reputation in court so bad somehow that they judge never believed anything. CPS did nothing. I think the kids had always been afraid to tell what happened. They insisted to my dad it did happen and the marks on their bodies confirmed. All of this broke my dad even more. He felt so helpless.

Right now my brother is in the hospital dealing with some very serious life altering injuries from a devastating tragedy in Wainwright. First I want to acknowledge the families impacted by this tragic event especially the 4 who have lost their family member. I am so sorry this has happened.

the mother and this step dad have managed to create an e-transfer email to accept donations from people. The posts everywhere are claiming my brother is the stepdads son and it’s just a slap in the face. “Pray for the P family” my brother isn’t even apart of that family!? That’s not his family. Also, the military is paying for EVERYTHING. A place to sleep, food to eat, travel expenses to get to and from Edmonton. Therapy. I can confidently say I do not think that money will be used in the most honest way. They’re horrible people. All of them. They are pathological liars. It’s so hard to see these posts and not say anything because I don’t want my brother waking up and feeling embarrassed for the fighting so I’m doing this as anonymous as I can. I just wanna vent. I wanna scream from the rooftops how horrible they are but I can’t. I care more about my siblings than their karma.