My daughter didn’t sleep through the night for the first three years of her life.

Not once.

She would wake and stir. She needed pressure and presence. She wanted to hear my voice and feel movement—rocking, patting, pacing the floor in the dark. Her body never fully powered down the way other babies’ bodies seemed to. I learned how to function on fragments of sleep because that was what loving and parenting her required. There was no diagnosis yet, no language for what we were dealing with. Just a quiet knowing that this was not a typical parenting experience.

People tried to help in the ways people always do. “Maybe she’s teething.” “Maybe it’s a phase.” “Have you tried letting her cry it out?”

I tried everything I could without abandoning what I already sensed about my child.

This wasn’t about routine or discipline or something we were doing wrong. This was just Rae. Even before I had words for it, I could feel that her body did not settle the way most other babies’ bodies did.

At the time, I didn’t think in terms of neurodivergence. I just thought: she is different. Not broken. Not bad. Just wired in a way that didn’t fit the scripts I had been given about babies and sleep. It also didn’t match what I had seen while working as a nanny for so many other children.

Those years were exhausting in a way that is hard to explain if you haven’t lived it. Not just tired, but worn at the edges. And even then, I could see something about her that would later become clearer: she processed the world with her entire body.

I didn’t yet have language for sensory processing or nervous systems, but I had instinct. I knew she wasn’t waking because she was needy or difficult. She was struggling to process the world around her.

So I rocked. I paced. I patted her back. I played music and sang. I learned how to be the calm she couldn’t yet find on her own. I wasn’t perfect at it, but I kept showing up.

Years later, when I finally understood her nervous system better and how it worked, I could see what had really been happening in those nights. She wasn’t just restless. She was overwhelmed. She was trying to regulate in a body that could not do it alone yet.

Those nights suddenly made sense on a whole other level.

She wasn’t refusing rest.

She was struggling to ask for help finding it.

I was tired.

Bone-tired in the way only long nights with a child can make you. But I also loved those moments when she would finally fall asleep in my arms or on my chest. When her body would soften against mine. When she would look up at me with those big brown eyes, wide and searching, like I was the most fascinating person she had ever seen.

Even then, I was learning her.

I learned that being calm for her helped. That gentle pressure on her arms and legs helped. That rocking her along with my own body soothed both of us. That slow, careful touch—what I would later learn was infant massage—helped her settle when nothing else could.

I didn’t have the language yet. I didn’t know about sensory input or regulation or nervous systems. I just tried things.

And some of them worked.

Not because I was doing everything right, but because I was listening to her body instead of forcing it to follow a script. I wasn’t trying to make her smaller. I was trying to help her feel safer inside herself.

She wasn’t refusing rest.

She was struggling to find it.

And in those quiet hours, without a plan or a diagnosis or a map, I stayed. I held her. I learned her rhythms. I learned what her body asked for when words weren’t enough.

Looking back now, I can see what I was already doing before I could name it.

I loved her even when I didn’t have the language. That was what kept me trying. I didn’t need a label to know she deserved understanding. I just knew she was communicating with her body, and it was my job to listen.

And that love taught me to ask different questions. Not “How do I make her stop?” but “What is her nervous system asking for?” Not “What’s wrong with her?” but “What support would help her feel safe?”

Those were the questions that led us to answers later. To appointments. To occupational therapy. To a diagnosis that didn’t change who she was, but finally gave us a map for how to care for her.

I wasn’t just getting us through the nights.

I was learning the child she already was, and I refused to stop.