Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I've been going up to our older son's house to help out with the baby.  That experience has been lovely, but a side benefit has been time to talk once the baby is asleep at night or grocery shopping or on a walk.  He's a historian, and he's been wondering about early experiences of him and his sister.  So he asks questions, some of which I can't answer because either I no longer remember or never knew, and he reveals his preschool and up experiences that I wasn't present for and did not learn about until now.  Often it is sad:  what I couldn't know and the suffering he was too young to express to me.  I had sole custody of the kids, but no way of knowing what happened on visitation visits and no one around my exhusband who observed anything. 
But this is good.  He can tell me, I can hear with regret but without freaking out.  And I really had no choice in the matter.  This was before people knew the term "battered woman" and way before people could see a connection between that and fear generated by the batterer to his children.  I would have had to have hidden out, and there were no shelters or underground.  I obeyed the judge.  I was tortured over it, but powerless to stop the visits or get supervised visits.  I thought their father had calmed down, but it sounds like he wasn't calm enough.
This is coming up now because my son has a son, and he's figuring out how to protect and defend him.  When he described being bullied at school, I felt sad, but I was bullied as well, and pushed off a tall slide sideways by a mean boy right in the asphalt playground.  I remember bloody knees and my dad coming to pick me up and take me to the doctor.  It's vicious on school playgrounds, and I don't blame my parents for not protecting me.  I wish my son had told me at the time, so I could at least have lodged a protest with the principal, but stopping rough stuff in school is almost impossible. 
Being a parent involves that helplessness you feel when you know your child will be in situations where you are powerless.  That's truly scary, and painful, and yet a part of life.  We seldom tell our parents until the incident is way past, if we ever tell them.  Maybe partly because to do so would drive home to us how little they can really do.  So we protect the truth from our parents, out of instinctive wisdom about the nature of our lives.