Allison Moorer - I Dream He Talks to Me: A Memoir of Learning How to Listen

Copyright 2021 by Allison Moorer

Cover design by Amanda Kain

Cover artwork Stephanie Spradling

Cover copyright 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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First Edition: October 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Moorer, Allison, author.

Title: I dream he talks to me : a memoir of learning how to listen / Allison Moorer.

Description: First edition. | New York : Hachette Books, 2021.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012467 | ISBN 9780306923074 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780306923067 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Moorer, Allison. | SingersUnited StatesBiography. | Mothers of autistic childrenUnited StatesBiography. | Autistic childrenFamily relationshipsUnited States. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC ML420.M575 A3 2021 | DDC 782.42164092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012467

ISBNs: 9780306923074 (hardcover), 9780306923067 (ebook)

E3-20210914-JV-NF-ORI

For Mama.

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

Seamus Heaney

I wasnt sure how you would feel about me telling people these things about us, so I wrote every word here imagining you were reading each one over my shoulder. There were days when writing them felt like the last thing I wanted to do, but I make art from my life. I dont always get to choose the content.

Some say an artist should never include her children in her work no matter the circumstances, that the best stories are the best just as much or more because of what you leave out of them rather than what you put in. But you are my work, my beloved son. You are my minds resting place. You are my life. Sometimes the stories we love the most are our favorites because of what were brave enough to leave in.

I cant remember who it was that once said to me, Youre one of those people with one of those lives, but I do remember not being able to argue that urgent and important things have happened. They still do. Those happenings inevitably require a response from me, and the best one I can offer is to try to turn them and their effects into something I can present back and whisper, Heres what Ive faced. Heres what Ive learned from it. You are not alone in how you feel. No matter what it is, it can be okay. Thats the most honorable way Ive figured out how to be of help or service in this world. More than any other person or event, you have taught me, and you have changed me just by being you. You have been doing that since the day you were born. You will continue to do that until the day I die. So I cant imagine keeping to myself what a profound effect youve had on who I am. That is the most urgent and important of all the things that have happened. I figure youre okay with people knowing that and understand that if I left you out of the stories I tell, Id be leaving them mostly untold because you are, in fact, the constant coauthor of my life now.

My gratitude to you feels endless, but I want to thank you most of all for showing me that the best way to love a person is to let them be exactly who they are. And just so you know, exactly who you are is perfect. I hope you dont mind if thats something I shout from the rooftops.

I love you.
Mama
Nashville, Tennessee
November 2020

T heres a place in the human singing voice right around the top of the middle that can sound like a bell. Its a mixture of chest and head voice. Ive always called it the mid-beltwhere you can get a significant amount of air, or power, behind a note and belt it out, as they say. It vibrates in the body that makes it, and in the air that it hits.

John Henrys father and I are both singer-songwriters, and we were on an extended tour together the summer John Henry started walking. One particular August Sunday we didnt have a show to do, so I played with John Henry in the tour bus and half-heartedly watched 60 Minutes . When the show aired a profile of a teenage gospel choir, my interest grew. The choir was singing Amazing Grace. I sang along, but when I got to the a before the word wretch in the first verse, John Henry pushed his tiny hands into my chest and his face away from mine. I had held the mid-belt note for a little bit too long. His face broke, and he cried. I stopped singing. He was sixteen months old.

Music makes me cry too. I am often overwhelmed by the beauty or emotional resonance of a voice or composition. Ive considered it one of my more annoying afflictionsthat I can become a sobbing mess when I hear a certain vocal tone or a particularly beautiful conglomeration of notes.

But I had never seen that response in a toddler. And what I saw in John Henry that Sunday afternoon wasnt a feature of his personality. It wasnt a development. It was more as if something had gone missing.

I had seen him display little behaviors that I thought were maybe odd. He had a tendency to repeatedly turn objects over in his hands or play with one part of a toy instead of its entirety. He would rub his legs together against textured floor surfaces or in the bathtub as soon as he could sit on his ownwe called it crickets. But I didnt know that Sunday afternoon that I was looking at a human being who couldnt manage the information he received in a typical fashion. I didnt know it until I saw him burst into what I could tell were tears of emotion when I hit that note. I didnt know it until my mind raced around wondering why hed cried them, and then realized that he had been using his words less and less in the weeks that preceded that day, that he had shuddered when he heard the drum kit on the Friday before at sound check, and that he had stopped turning his head toward anyone who said his name. I didnt know until then that my baby very likely had autism. Music has provided myriad revelations for me throughout my life, but this was one I didnt welcome.