Off Balance: A Memoir Read online

  Shortly after they arrived in Hollywood, my mother’s hunch that she was pregnant, which she felt even before leaving Greece, was confirmed. My parents were in a foreign country without a dime to their name, unable to speak the language, and had no home. To make ends meet, Tata took odd jobs, anything he could find to make a few dollars. He found steady work in the cafeteria at an English-language school and was in charge of preparing and serving coffee, danishes, small candies, chocolates, sandwiches, and so on. Although it was a far cry from his entrepreneurial visions, it was work. He and my mother relied on every penny and didn’t buy anything except absolute essentials that first year. In a good month, it was just enough to get by.

  They stayed with Tata’s brother Costa and his new wife when they first arrived in Hollywood, but soon realized the tight quarters wouldn’t last forever. After a few months, they moved out and were transient for most of that first year, living with friends, often sleeping on spare beds or sofas. From time to time, they’d have to sleep in their car, a Volkswagen Beetle, until they found a new place to stay.

  All the while, my pregnant mother was frightened deeply by the uncertainty of their safety and future. She ached to return home to Romania, but she knew my father did not consider it an option. Everything felt so foreign to her; she felt isolated and alone. No friends, no ability to speak the language, no driving. She cried every day but was careful to hide it from Tata. She turned to the one thing she could afford and that brought her the comforts of home: prayer. She prayed they’d have a place of their own even if it was a shack. And she prayed for the health and safety of her family back in Romania.

  My mother relied exclusively on my father’s advice and approval for everything. She was an inexperienced and sheltered teenager who knew the world only from what she’d read in books and seen in the movies. Growing up on her parents’ farm with her siblings, she never imagined she’d end up in Hollywood, the land of movie stars, freeways, and high-rises. She did the only thing that was familiar: she plunged into books to learn about her new culture and, most important, started teaching herself English. She relied on a dog-eared Romanian-English dictionary she had brought from home. At first it was difficult, but through practice and watching children’s television shows, she gradually began to pick it up. Her confidence grew slowly until she felt comfortable enough to speak in public.

  Throughout her pregnancy, prayer was the only form of health care my mother received—she constantly prayed for a healthy delivery. She received zero prenatal care and never once visited a doctor prior to giving birth. My parents had no health insurance and really didn’t understand the risks, complications, or overall protocol of giving birth. They were poor immigrants but somehow managed to stay alive and have food and shelter. Although they had been strangers when they met and married only months prior, the challenges and struggles definitely brought my parents closer and forged a bond between them. My mother began to feel an attachment to Tata in a way she had never before experienced. She relied on him for everything. In retrospect, he didn’t know much, either, but between them, he was undoubtedly more experienced when it came to street smarts and basic survival skills. He’d at least traveled some of the world and lived on his own before their marriage.

  My mother’s prayers were answered, in part at least, when they finally saved enough money to rent an apartment just before I was born. It was a studio apartment on Whitney Street, just off Hollywood Boulevard. It may have been tiny and not in the best neighborhood, but to my parents, it was a castle—finally, a place of their own.

  Despite the complete lack of prenatal care, my mother had no complications during her pregnancy, and I was delivered the old-fashioned way with no birthing drugs. The only drama came prior to my delivery while my mother was in labor. My parents were forced to travel to two different Los Angeles hospitals before a third one, Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, finally accepted an uninsured, pregnant woman in active labor. My father stayed in the waiting area during the delivery, leaving my mother alone in a room full of doctors and nurses. After only a handful of months studying English, she could understand only half of what they were saying and was forced to communicate, in part, through gestures.

  I was born on September 30, 1981, at 1:27 p.m., weighing in at seven pounds, six ounces. As she tells it, my mother pushed a few times, and I came quite quickly without a fuss. Although exhausted, she felt a wave of peace wash over her as she held her baby girl in her arms for the very first time.

  Now, as an adult and a mother, I better understand my parents’ overpowering urge to give me everything the world had to offer, and then some. I still remember holding my own children for the first time—that moment when I realized I’d do anything for them. My parents had left their homeland, their families, and everything familiar to them to build a better life in the United States. Looking back, I can appreciate my mother and Tata both determined in their own way to make my life count. I can see how my parents’ growing up in a dictatorship and my mother’s oppressive upbringing and crushed dream of a future in sports culminated in an intense need to give me everything they could not have. Sadly, the line between what is best for a child and what a parent thinks is best for the child is often blurred, even by good intentions. This was a lesson I’d learn, but not soon enough.

  Chapter 3

  AWAKENING

  It’s taken the better part of three decades, but it’s safe to say that I’ve finally come to terms and fully accepted that my childhood wasn’t normal—in fact, wildly abnormal would be more apt. As I was growing up with parents plucked straight out of communist Romania and plopped down in the fast-paced American culture of the 1980s, it didn’t take much to see that my home life was “different.” Not only was our language different, our food, religion, holidays, customs, and even our clothes screamed “outsider.”

  Growing up, I was considered odd by the other kids in our neighborhood and at school. I was a straight-A student, excelling in my classwork, but I was extremely shy and quiet and didn’t become more talkative until my teenage years. In elementary and middle school, I was simply “the European kid” who spoke a strange language that nobody understood and ate weird foods like ground meat rolled up in cabbage leaves, called sarmale (s-ah-rh-mha-leh), with braunschweiger—a creamy type of liver spread from Germany—and pâté, ground meat minced into a spreadable paste. Mama used to put it on bread, sometimes toasted in the mornings for breakfast and sometimes on sandwiches she packed for my school lunch. What kid eats liver paste? Me and no other American schoolkid, I can assure you that. Mama would say it was a highly nutritious source of iron, protein, and vitamin A, but what kid cares about that? The other kids only cared that it looked “gross,” and as long as I ate those foods, nobody wanted to exchange lunches with me, which excluded me from the social game of lunch hour.

  After a while, I didn’t want to bring lunch from home and instead asked Mama for the $1.10 so I could buy a school lunch and a chocolate milk in its own tiny carton. Mama had no problem giving me lunch money a couple times each week, and I was relieved. I learned what other kids ate and asked Mama for those foods—bologna sandwiches, potato chips, and cookies. Oddly, I didn’t try the American classic PB&J until I was much older—after the Olympics at age fourteen! I loved it! Eating strange foods was part of who I was, but I believed eating the same foods as my classmates would help me fit in, and I needed all the help I could get.

  I was sometimes singled out by other students at school, leaving me even more self-conscious and insecure about who I was. Who was I, after all? I didn’t even really know back then. I struggled daily to fit in. I remember one day in third-grade gym class when the instructor selected two students as team captains to pick squads for kickball. I wasn’t close with anyone in my class, but I truly felt like an outcast that afternoon when everyone else’s name in the class was called one by one and I was left standing all by myself looking from side to side uncomfortably and somewhat mortified. It was clear that n
either wanted me and they simply refused to choose me. The PE teacher finally came to my rescue and named me to a team to break the awkward silence. It felt like an eternity as I walked in shame to stand in line with my team. I felt so unwanted. I didn’t belong anywhere.

  In retrospect, incidents like that just added fuel to my isolation and made me feel out of place in a time when I was trying so hard to find myself. All I really knew was that I had a strange last name and parents who were from a country that no kids, and few adults, could find on the map. My parents had heavy accents when they spoke English, and nobody could ever pronounce our last name correctly. I avoided saying my last name as much as possible when I was younger because I was embarrassed when people would ask me to repeat it over and over and still weren’t able to pronounce it correctly. It only reminded me of how awkward and weird I was among my peers.

  Believe it or not, I still had anxiety about saying my last name in public as teenager after I had already become an internationally known gymnast. I remember panicking when I was thirteen years old at a USA–Belarus–China gymnastics competition called the Visa Challenge in 1995. In a televised interview, the reporter asked each member of Team USA to introduce herself by saying her first and last name into the cameras for the viewers at home. As she went down the row of my teammates standing in a line beside the balance beam, I quickly tried to rehearse how I should pronounce “Moceanu.” I must’ve said it five different ways, trying to figure out which pronunciation would be easiest to understand. I could hear Tata’s voice rattling in my head, as he would say our family name proudly—our name is “M-oh-chee-ah-noo!” He said it with such certainty and such finality, but I still thought it sounded funny when I said it out loud. I wasn’t comfortable for some reason.

  I wasn’t nearly as nervous to compete in the meet as I was during these introductions. As the cameraman went down the line, one by one my teammates said their names with confidence: “Dominique Dawes,” “Katie Teft,” “Kellee Davis.” When he got to me in the middle of the group, my mind jumped and I intentionally mispronounced my name “Dominique M-oh-sey-noo.” I couldn’t believe I had just changed my name on national TV to make it easier for people to say. It sounded so silly once it came out of my mouth, and immediately I realized I had made a mistake and probably greatly disappointed my family, too. I felt awful.

  I guess I was still haunted by my earlier years when I was ashamed of my name during roll call at school. I’d be so nervous as I squirmed at my desk waiting for the teacher to scroll down the alphabet and finally get to my name. There was always a pause after my first name, the teacher unsure how to pronounce my name. They’d give their best crack at it, but it would always end up butchered.

  I rarely went on playdates or invited anyone home to play in those early elementary years, which didn’t help in the friend department. I was nervous that Tata would say or do something to scare them off for good. Tata could be charming and friendly, but he could also be aloof and act suspicious of “outsiders.” Romanian was all I spoke at home. Mama and Tata were multilingual, speaking Greek, Romanian, and English fairly fluently. English took the most effort, though, so they would resort to what made them most comfortable around the house, and that was speaking Romanian. I am thankful and grateful now that I learned it, but when I was young I resented that I was forced to speak Romanian at home. It was yet another reminder that I was different.

  It was a constant struggle for me to make friends. I didn’t feel, act, or look like anyone else at school or in my neighborhood, but once I put on my leotard, stepped into the gymnasium, and felt that mat under my feet, all of those feelings of being an outsider vanished. Gymnastics—the amazing sport it is—became my outlet and gave me confidence.

  My life as a gymnast actually began at the age of three, shortly after Tata moved the family to Illinois in pursuit of a new business opportunity. My parents enrolled me in tennis and gymnastics classes at Northbrook Square Gymnastics in Chicago, near where we lived. Tennis lasted for only one lesson, and that was the end of that, but I took to gymnastics immediately. When I close my eyes, I can still recall my earliest memory of gymnastics class, watching a group of kids bouncing on the trampoline in the corner of the gym. The trampoline—the apparatus every kid loves most—was like a magnet for me. I didn’t know what it was, had never seen anything like it, but I knew I wanted to do it. I wanted to be one of those little kids in a leotard and tights, laughing and jumping and waiting in line for another turn.

  I felt an instant connection with gymnastics, a connection that has stayed with me and provided my childhood with a desperately needed sense of belonging. The gym was my haven, the one place where I could fit in. Beyond the ethnic and cultural issues that ostracized me, I was also physically different. I was awkward looking with huge brown eyes, dark brown, pencil-straight hair styled into an old-school Romanian bowl haircut from the 1980s. And I was very, very small. I was always the tiniest kid on my street and in my classes at school. While the average five-year-old girl is about 3' 8" tall and 45 pounds, I was nowhere near that size until I was almost ten. It wasn’t until I was nine years old that I reached 3' 10" and 50 pounds. Even as an Olympian in 1996, when I was fourteen, I measured only 4' 4" and weighed in at 70 pounds. Because my size made me look younger than my actual age, I was sometimes teased by the other children. They’d call me “shorty,” “small fry,” and “shrimp.”

  The gym was the one place I didn’t have to worry about feeling awkward for being so petite. It was where I felt most at home. Gymnastics was challenging and often hard work, but I loved the movements, the stretching, rolling, flipping, twisting, and bending. And although I didn’t know exactly what it meant at the time, it made me feel good when my instructors kept nodding their heads and telling me I was a “natural.”

  By the time I was five, Tata decided the family should leave behind the brutal winters of Chicago and move to the warmer climate of Florida. Another new city, new neighborhood, new kids, new job for Tata, and a new gym. I remember the first day Mama and I walked into LaFleur’s Gymnastics in Tampa. The gym was a good forty-minute drive from my family’s apartment in Temple Terrace, but Mama didn’t seem to mind, especially since we spent most of the drive talking and listening to the radio. I squeezed Mama’s hand tightly as we made our way through the gym’s doors and lobby. I loved the warmth I felt from Mama. I always felt so close and so safe with her. I loved her so much.

  As Mama and I sat in the waiting area watching more children arrive with their mothers and some with their fathers, I kept peeking at the gym through the viewing window. I remember thinking that the gym was so much bigger than my first gym back in Chicago and was set up differently. I began to wonder if they did the same kind of gymnastics in Tampa as they do in Chicago. And then I saw it. There it was, on the right-hand side of the gym … the trampoline. But it wasn’t just one; they had three trampolines connected one to the other, built up on a podium surrounded by carpet. The trampoline was my favorite, and I never grew tired of it. I sat in my white leotard with little sparkles, counting the minutes for class to start!

  And so it began: Our routine of driving to LaFleur’s several times each week for my gymnastics classes. The gym’s owners, Jeff and Julie LaFleur, along with Beth Hair, made up my new coaching team. It was the beginning of a wonderful and nurturing relationship with a triad of coaches: Jeff as my primary coach, Julie as my dance coach and floor choreographer, and Beth as my balance beam coach. Most of the skills I learned from them I carried with me for the rest of my career. With their guidance, I excelled quickly and developed a true love affair with the sport of gymnastics. I am forever grateful that we landed at the doors of LaFleur’s Gymnastics when we moved to Florida.

  These unjaded early years of gymnastics were magical for me and hold some of my purest and most inspiring memories of the sport. Putting on my leotard, packing my bag, and climbing into the car with Mama was invigorating and symbolized my path to something wonderful and safe.
Every time I walked through the doors of that gym, I felt alive and excited. I knew this was the sport for me, even at the young age of five. There wasn’t anything in my life that I felt so strongly about or, aside from Mama, that I loved so much.

  By the time I was seven, I started to realize that I didn’t just love gymnastics, but also that I had a special gift for it. I started to notice that I learned quickly and picked up new maneuvers faster than the other girls in my classes. It was as if I were born to do gymnastics. A big plus in my favor was that I had no fear. Even at six, I was a daredevil, relishing challenges and more than willing to try any new somersault, back bend, or flip. Fear only set in much later, when my surroundings and pressures changed in the sport and in my life, but as a child I was virtually carefree when I learned and performed. I would overhear my coaches telling my parents in serious tones that I had true natural ability for the sport and that they were very excited to be working with me. I could feel the energy from their excitement. I noticed that the coaches spent extra one-on-one time working with me and that they appreciated my fearless approach.

  My parents believed early on that gymnastics would be my future and were determined to do whatever it took for me to succeed. The high priority they placed on my gymnastics explains their willingness to spend money on my classes and training even though most months we lived hand-to-mouth. In their eyes I was destined to be a meaningful contributor to the sport that meant so much to their home country. My parents often used to tell a story about the moment they knew I’d become a champion gymnast. I’ve heard them tell it so many times, I can recite it in my sleep: “We put Dominique on a clothesline at six months old to see how long she could hang on and test her strength. She didn’t let go until the clothesline broke!” It still makes me laugh when I picture Tata telling it with the same level of enthusiasm each time. He’d actually act out the story, fists over his head pretending to imitate me holding on to that clothesline. He was so proud that he was almost giddy when he shared this story over and over throughout the years.