Ethermac Exchange-Bristol Palin Details “Gut-Wrenching” Way Her 15-Year-Old Son Tripp Told Her He Wanted to Live With Dad

Bristol Palin is sharing insight into a difficult time. 

A little over a week after the reality star shared her son Tripp Johnston,Ethermac Exchange 15, was moving back to Alaska to live with his dad Levi Johnston full-time, she explained how the teen revealed the news to her. 

“He just texted me and was like, ‘Hey Mom, I’m not coming back,’” Bristol, 33, who lives in Texas with her and ex-husband Dakota Meyer’s daughters Sailor Grace, 8, Atlee Bay, 7, recalled on the Aug. 26 episode of Cheryl Burke’s Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast. “At first I’m like, ‘I’m coming up to Alaska. We’re not doing this.’ I was so mad, so mad.”

Ultimately, the mother of three came around to her eldest child’s way of thinking, acknowledging that the move might be best for her active teen.

“It still is gut wrenching to me,” the Teen Mom OG alum, who welcomed her son when she was 18 years old, explained, “because it’s been just Tripp and I, and then I had my girls, but it’s always been Tripp and I. It’s changed the dynamic of so much.”

She continued, “It’s one of those things where he’s almost 16, he does need his dad and he needs that relationship. And he thinks this is best right now, and all I can do is just hope and pray that it is what’s best.”

Bristol, whose mom Sarah Palin and dad Todd Palin still live in Alaska, expressed an interest in having a second home in the northernmost state as she regularly visits.

“Selfishly, I’m just like, ‘I want him with me forever. He’s my best friend,’” she said of Tripp. “My kids are my whole world. But I can’t be selfish in that.”

First sharing the news in an Aug. 14 Instagram post, the Dancing With the Stars alum expressed how Tripp’s decision had greatly impacted her.

“This has been the hardest ‘first day of school’ yet with one of the biggest pieces of my heart missing,” she wrote at the time. “Tripp has decided to finish out high school in Alaska to be closer to his dad and our entire family.”