Hello everyone and welcome to Enchanted Whispers with Aveline Grove.
I am your host Aveline and today I invite you into something different,
Something real.
This is not a polished lesson.
It is not a meditative experience.
It is simply a unfolding a lesson in real life of a boy who said no long before he ever said yes and what that taught me as his parent and as a human.
This is a lesson in intuition,
Alignment,
And the courage it takes to live differently in a world that expects sameness.
I want to invite you into a different way of seeing,
A way of seeing children not as blank slates to be shaped,
But as souls who arrive already carrying their own compass,
Their own timing,
Their own inner truth,
Their own compass of yes and no.
If you are a parent,
I hope that there is something here that you can take away to help support you on your journey,
Some encouragement that you're doing everything right even when it feels like you're not.
If you are not a parent,
I invite you to think about your own life.
I mean,
Honestly,
Even as parents can think about our own lives and the shapes that we've taken,
The places that we've said yes and no to,
How those journeys have shaped us over the years.
This is a way of seeing parenting not as molding a child into who or what we think they should be,
But it's simply supporting another human on the path they chose for this lifetime.
There is a belief,
A philosophy,
A possibility,
I don't even know,
Whatever you want to call it,
That says we choose the families that we are born into,
That we choose our parents the way that we are born into this lifetime,
Whether by cesarean or natural birth or entry point,
So to speak,
And the conditions of that birth,
Of that entering into the world begin to shape us into the versions of ourselves that we will be.
I have to believe that if that is true,
And I do believe that is true personally,
Then it stands to reason that we come into this lifetime with a sense of our own soul's purpose long before we have the ability to speak it with words.
This is a story of my son's unfolding.
He is 18 now.
How his no became his first language of alignment and how trusting him meant going against the grain.
For me,
How the outside world misunderstood what was actually happening in my relationship with my son and how in the end his path made sense in a way that only intuition can explain.
My son has always been someone who knows when something isn't for him.
This was not after a season or a month or some arbitrary timeline placed on him by someone else.
Sometimes it occurred after a single moment.
The first time this happened,
He was three or four years old and he wanted to play baseball.
So I bought him the tiny mitt and the bat and I found a little league team that was in our community and I signed him up and he went to one practice.
One.
And on the way home he said,
I'm done.
That's not it.
Proclaimed very loudly from my backseat.
I remember looking back in the rearview mirror at him and thinking,
You have got to be kidding me.
But something inside of me,
Something intuitive,
Knew that he was telling the truth.
Not the truth about baseball,
But a truth about himself.
So I simply said,
Okay.
And that okay became a pattern.
Two or three years later,
We were at the local fair and there was a sign up for karate.
And we did.
We signed up for karate.
He went to one class.
No.
The next year it was basketball.
Two seasons later,
He said,
I'm done.
Not anymore.
Within that time frame,
There was tennis,
A summer camp of tennis,
Two or three weeks.
He was done.
Flag football,
Tackle football,
He called it tackle down football.
Some pieces of it he liked,
Some he didn't.
In the end,
The answer was no.
And every time I trusted him,
Not because I wanted to raise a child who quit,
But because I wanted to raise a child who could hear his own voice and believe it above all else.
Trust me,
This came with opinions and loud ones from other people.
I heard things such as,
He needs discipline.
He'll never stick with anything.
You're being too soft.
You're raising a quitter.
He needs to man up.
Really?
Three-year-old needs to man up.
You're letting him get away with too much.
Who's parenting who?
But here's what they didn't understand.
He wasn't quitting.
And I wasn't being too soft.
He wasn't weak.
And he wasn't avoiding discomfort.
He was discerning and honoring alignment.
He was already being intuitive and practicing this deep inner listening that many of us even to this day struggle with.
And I wasn't being too soft.
I was attuning,
Attuning to being his parent and to listening and to learning to trust the path of another.
I was parenting the child I had,
Not the one the world expected.
And we were learning together.
After all those years and nothing stuck,
There was about a 10-year pause of literally nothing.
No sports,
No activity,
No clear direction.
Lots of opinions from outside people about this lack of involvement,
What looked like a lack of motivation.
And I stayed still.
And I trusted him.
I trusted that his path was unfolding in its own time.
I trusted that forcing him into something would only teach him to abandon himself.
I trusted that intuition,
His and mine,
Was guiding us even when it looked like we were doing nothing.
Then at 17,
The end of his junior year,
He said something I never expected.
I want to join the wrestling team.
For the first time in his entire life,
He felt pulled towards something,
And I felt resistance.
Not because I didn't trust him,
Not because I doubted his intuition,
But because I was scared.
As a mom,
Wrestling,
Of all things,
All the things that he could have chose,
Why that?
A hand-to-hand,
Body-to-body sport where real injury can occur.
A sport where someone's full weight is on top of you.
A sport where you're twisted,
Pinned,
Slammed,
Held down.
Something that demands a kind of physical aggression that he's never shown an interest in.
My mind went straight into every possible scenario.
The injuries,
The concussions,
The possible broken bones,
The emotional toll of losing,
The physical toll of competing.
I had spent his whole childhood protecting his sensitivity,
His gentleness,
His intuitive nature,
And suddenly he wanted to step into a world that felt like the complete opposite of that,
And of who he was,
Who he had always been,
Who I had come to learn that he was.
So yes,
I resisted,
But not because I didn't believe in him,
Because I loved him,
And I wanted what was best for him,
And because this was the first time his intuition led him somewhere that scared me.
But here's the thing about intuitive parenting.
Trust doesn't mean comfort,
It doesn't mean agreement,
And it doesn't mean the path that feels safe for you.
Trust means you honor the path that belongs to them.
So I let him go.
I let him try.
I let him walk into something that made no sense to me,
But made perfect sense to him.
And what unfolded was nothing short of transformative.
He went to off-season practices.
He met the team.
He showed up.
And when senior year came,
He tried out and he made it.
He didn't quit.
For the first time,
He didn't quit.
He practiced.
He pushed himself.
He supported his teammates.
He showed up when he didn't have to.
He found community,
His community,
And discipline,
A version of himself that I had never seen before,
And that I could have never imagined existed.
The boy who once walked away from everything walks straight into something hard,
Demanding,
Practical,
Intense,
And he stayed.
Not because I pushed him,
Not because society told him to,
But because he chose it.
This was his path,
His yes.
The young man who walked off that mat was not the same boy who stepped onto it.
He was steadier now,
More sure of himself,
Even more aligned with who he truly is.
Around that same time,
We were having big conversations that have continued into this year.
We are at the end of his senior year now,
About what do you want to do in your life?
What direction feels right?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Those conversations.
What's next?
He explored big dreams and ideas and some small ones.
There were things tossed around like a cook,
A doctor,
A surgeon,
A psychiatrist,
Always pulled towards this medical field,
This idea of helping others.
One day he said,
I want to be a nurse.
His reasons were thoughtful,
Grounded,
And compassionate.
Reasons that made sense to who he is,
Who he's always been.
We looked at colleges.
He chose one about four hours from home.
He completed his four weeks DNA program.
He chose an accelerated path that required discipline and demand.
Five hours a night after school for four weeks,
He earned his certificate.
He signed up for the state exam.
He saw it through,
Not because I pushed him,
Not because someone else told him to,
But again,
Because he chose it.
This was his path.
The boy who quit everything didn't quit what was aligned for him.
Here's my lesson to you.
Your takeaway.
If you are an intuitive parent listening to this,
Your child knows more about their path than you do.
Their no is not defiance.
Okay,
Sometimes it feels like defiance,
But it's usually wisdom,
Their protection,
Their alignment.
Their yes may come late and it may come unexpectedly.
It may not look like,
It probably won't look like what you have imagined,
But it will be true to them.
And if you're a young intuitive that's listening to this,
Know that you are allowed to know yourself better than anyone else.
You're allowed to change your mind.
You're allowed to choose differently.
You're allowed to follow the path that feels right inside your body when it makes no sense to anyone else.
You don't need permission to be aligned and you don't need validation to trust your gut.
Your unfolding is not supposed to look like anyone else's.
And if you're someone on the outside looking in,
If you've watched a child quit things and assumed it was weakness,
If you've watched a parent say okay and assumed it was indulgence,
If you believe that discipline only comes through force or pressure,
I want to offer you a different lens.
Some children are not meant to be shaped by external expectations.
Some children are wired to feel their way through life,
Not grind and force their way through it.
And the parents of those children are not being soft.
They're being attuned.
From the outside,
It may look like quitting.
It may look like inconsistency.
It may look like a lack of discipline.
But on the inside,
Where intuition lives,
Something entirely different is happening.
A child is learning to trust themselves.
A parent is learning to trust the child.
And together they are building a relationship rooted not in control but in alignment.
Some paths only make sense when you witness the unfolding from within.
As I look back now,
What I see most clearly is that none of this was ever about sports,
Or quitting,
Or sticking things out.
It was about a child who arrived in this world already knowing himself and a mother learning over and over again to trust that knowing even when it didn't match what the world expected.
A boy who walked away from everything that wasn't aligned eventually walked straight towards the thing that was.
And even when it scared me,
He stepped onto that wrestling mat as someone still figuring himself out.
And he walked off as a young man more rooted,
More certain,
And more aligned with who he truly is,
With who he came here to be.
This is what happens when intuition is honored instead of overridden.
So wherever you are,
Whether you are parenting an intuitive child,
Remembering your own intuitive childhood,
Or standing on the outside trying to understand what the heck is happening,
I hope this story opens something in you.
A softening,
A widening,
A willingness to trust the quiet signals that don't always make sense in the moment.
Because some paths only reveal their meaning in hindsight.
Some children only bloom when given space.
And some lives,
Maybe yours,
Maybe your child's,
Maybe your grandchild's,
Are only meant to be lived by intuition,
Not expectation.
And that kind of unfolding is worth trusting.
Thank you for joining.
Thank you for listening.
Blessed Be.
Blessed Be.
Blessed Be.
