My kids were never great sleepers. That elusive sleep – despite our best team efforts, an abundance of patience, and our peaceful, (mostly) consistent bedtime routine — we never found it. We could get our kids to sleep, but they never stayed there. As an infant, Doodlebug never slept more than 2 hours at a time.

We tried so many variations of things. I nursed to sleep. I put him to “sleep” awake. We read books. We gave him a bath. We skipped the bath. We bought expensive sound machines, crib mobiles, melodic stuffed animals. When we couldn’t think of anything else to buy, we sang different lullabies. We sang the same lullaby. Over and over and over.  I thought I must be missing something everyone else knew. As an exhausted first-time Mom, I searched countless websites and Facebook groups for sleep advise. How should I handle those frequent late-night wake-up calls? Was there a magic trick that I was missing? I don’t remember exactly where I read it, but the advice was mostly the same across various places –

Be boring. Be uninteresting. Don’t make eye contact.

I remember so many nights trying desperately to get my son back to sleep. Nearly (and sometimes actually) putting myself to sleep with rocking back and forth and back and forth. I became a white noise machine with my shushing sounds. I would count the number of light pats on my son’s tush as I shushed and rocked. When I got to 100, I would start over again. And over again and over again. And over again. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that my son’s eyes were wide open. Sleep was nowhere to be found. His curious eyes were darting back and forth across my face, searching for me, waiting for me to make eye contact with him. But I didn’t. I looked away. I tried to be even more “boring”.

A year or so later — as speech never came, as my son seemed to not learn his name, as we wished for him to imitate any of our gestures, to “check in” with us before marching off into unknown situations, to search our faces for reactions and emotions, to mimic our expressions and words — those nights would haunt me. I would come to regret ever taking that advice.

Of course, I know that not making eye contact with my son on those late nights did not make him autistic. Yet in those days when I couldn’t get him to look at me, those nights when I would have given anything to see those sparkling hazel eyes staring into mine, I would have given anything to take back those moments when I had looked away. I wanted a do-over – another chance to enter that bubble that was forming around him. I longed to be back in that nursery with my baby boy’s sweet eyes searching my face, looking for his mama, trying to connect with me.

Those beautiful hazel eyes. How I missed them for years.

I see them now – those wide, innocent, mischievous, giggling, smoky eyes. I get glimpses of them now as they dart from his iPad to the TV to Hot Wheels race tracks. I feel so lucky when I catch one of his rare still moments. It’s usually when he quietly leans in to touch my earring, or ask me to smell his ear (just a couple of his unique regulating strategies), or when sleep is about to wash over his body, that those eyes gaze into mine and linger. And I cherish every one of those short, precious seconds.