Grace, Gold, and Glory Page 2

  By the summer of 1996, my parents were so over the whole Tulsa thing — so our next stop was Texas. We moved into the two-bedroom apartment of Mom’s Uncle Ben and Aunt Teresa in Irving. My uncle offered my dad job leads, and Dad eventually began working at a used car dealership; but because he didn’t sell many cars, he didn’t earn much money. So he quit that job. Around that time, Mom’s aunt and uncle traveled to the Olympic Games in Atlanta. Years later, Mom told me that her uncle left a note with her. “In that letter, my uncle wrote that he loved me and my kids, and that we were always welcome to stay with him,” Mom recalls. “He also wrote that he wouldn’t support a grown man, so we had to be moved out by the time they returned from the Olympics.” Arielle told me that Mom began looking for work too, since my father wasn’t working. It didn’t take long for Mom to land a job in the collections department at Citibank. In addition, Mom’s friend — the same one who’d once forwarded the hospital’s note about my blood disease — knew a young couple in Dallas. That friend asked the couple if they’d be willing to take us in temporarily, and they agreed. In the fall of 1996, Mom had saved up enough money for us to move into our own apartment in Richardson, Texas.

  Later that year when Mom celebrated my first birthday, I’d already been given the nickname my whole family still calls me: Brie Baby. Since then, we’ve put every possible spin on that name, including Brie Cheese and Breezy. And then there’s my personal favorite — Easy, Breezy, Beautiful Cover Girl. But if you ask me, none of those nicknames roll off the tongue quite as gracefully as my full name does: Gabrielle, which means “God’s able-bodied one.” When that blood disease almost snatched away my life, it might’ve seemed that I wouldn’t really live up to my name. But my heavenly Father had something totally different in mind. In Texas, as I grew stronger by the month — and as my mother worked to turn our family’s financial crisis into a comeback — my name’s meaning became a sneak preview of all that would come next.

  Chapter Two

  It is God who is at work in you, both to will

  and to work for His good pleasure.

  —PHILIPPIANS 2:13, NASB

  “GET DOWN FROM THERE, BRIE!” MOM SHOUTED IN THE DIRECTION OF my crib. I’d gripped all ten of my fingers around the wooden bars and was attempting to inch my entire body up toward the top of the crib. Just in time to keep me from falling, Mom darted over to the crib’s edge and pulled me into her arms. “You’re going to hurt yourself, child!”

  I wasn’t even quite two — yet I’d already turned my bed and our entire Richardson apartment into my own little obstacle course. With my days as a fragile, sickly baby long behind me, I’d grown into a teeny tot with the strongest grip my parents had ever witnessed in a child of my age. And I was a toughie: Even when I dove off the furniture and bumped my head, Mom says I would simply sit up, look around, let out one of my trademark giggles, and then keep right on jumping and wiggling. My older brother, John, and I are only fourteen months apart — so every time he attempted a hop or tumble in our living room, I was right there behind him with a copycat move. And that was just the beginning. Month after month, my daredevil attempts expanded to include everything from scaling to the top of a closet door (“Look, Mom!” I yelled from up above) to leaping off the back of our sofa and onto the kitchen table (I was pretending I was Supergirl). As it turns out, I can flip far better than I can fly — I hit my chin on the table’s edge and blood came spouting out. Ouch!

  John and I have been practically inseparable since we were tots. Even way back then, he was the protective older brother. Mom told me that once when I was two and John was three, I rode around a playground in a toy car — until a little boy came over and pushed me out of my seat. When John saw that, he ran up to the boy, pushed him out of the car and then pulled me back into the seat. He was like, “Go ahead, Brie. You can ride.” So even when we were tiny, he was on my side. Though we’ve both grown much taller since then, not much else has changed between us.

  Unless you’ve been vacationing on Saturn, you’ve probably heard that my oldest sister, Arielle, a former gymnast, showed me how to do a perfect cartwheel when I was just three and she was just nine. The two of us also practiced all kinds of other skills, aka tricks: spider-walk handstands, the splits, bridges, and back walkovers. “You were so flexible!” Arielle recently reminded me. “And you learned everything super fast. Pretty soon, you’d gone over my head — you’d already excelled my level of expertise!” In fact, after a week of mirroring Arielle’s moves, I went solo: I taught myself how to do a cartwheel on one hand. That’s when my sister really noticed that I had a special gift.

  “Mom, you need to put her in gymnastics!” Arielle hounded. Our mother’s answer was always the same: not enough dough. Plus, Arielle once broke her wrist in two places while doing a back handspring in her bedroom, which is why my mother took her out of classes for a few years. Mom didn’t want to risk the same kind of injury with her youngest child — her baby girl.

  “But she’s so talented,” Arielle pleaded. “Why don’t you put her in?”

  “I’m not interested,” Mom answered flatly.

  This exact negotiation went down time and time again in 1998. Then in 1999. Then in 2000, which is the year my parents separated and we headed to Virginia.

  At first, we all moved into the two-bedroom house of my mother’s mom, Miss Carolyn. Arielle first began calling my grandmother by that name back in 1990, after my grandmother married her now ex-husband, Marcus. Marcus’s little girl didn’t know what to call my grandmother, so she dubbed her “Miss Carolyn.” Arielle overheard the name and followed suit. When Joyelle, John, and I came along, we copied Arielle. When we arrived in 2000, we turned the downstairs of Miss Carolyn’s house into a kids’ bedroom. Arie and Joy slept on the couch, and John and I took the pullout futon bed. When Mom’s younger sister, Bianca (my aunt!) came home from college in the summer of 2001, Bianca reclaimed her bedroom— and Mom went to stay with a friend.

  Starting in November 2001, our family became separated. For about nine months, John, Joyelle, and I lived with my father, who had moved back from Texas after we did, and his parents at my grandparents’ home in Chesapeake, Virginia; Arielle stayed with Miss Carolyn in Virginia Beach, while Mom stayed with her friend. This gave our mother the chance to work around the clock and get back on her financial feet. We missed living with our mother, but we kept ourselves plenty busy around my grandparents’ neighborhood.

  That year, I got my first bike. John, Joyelle, and I rolled through my grandparents’ neighborhood — only their bikes were two-wheelers, while I still had training wheels! Do you know how annoying it is to ride a bike made for babies? I so wanted to balance on a regular bike. Whenever they sped up, they could just leave me in the dust. “Hey, wait a minute,” Joy pointed out one day, “your training wheels aren’t even on correctly.” So for at least a couple days, I’d been pouting for no good reason — my trainers hadn’t even been touching the ground! Without even knowing it, I’d taught myself how to ride a two-wheeler. Joy and John were pretty impressed, and I was just happy to be rolling with the big kids!

  Around the neighborhood, the three of us made new friends. Billy and David were our two best pals, and they lived across the street from us. We’d all play hide and seek and freeze tag, and for the longest time, I had a major crush on Billy. He was so tall! We all hung out together for hours every day; then at nightfall, we’d catch fireflies or play one last round of cops and robbers on our bikes.

  By 2002, Mom had squirreled away enough money to buy a three-bedroom, 1,378-square-foot town house. How awesome it was to have our whole family under one roof again! It didn’t take long for Arielle to reboot her campaign: “Mom,” she begged, “you need to put Brie in gymnastics.”

  Though Mom had a couple extra dollars to her name by this point, she still had no intention of signing me up for classes. She probably only did so because she needed a long nap. But here’s the official reason Mom still gives me: “I wa
s afraid you were going to hurt yourself!” she says. “I figured I should get you some formal instruction so you could burn off some of that energy.” That’s just how much of a spark plug I’d become.

  Mom intended to raise a gymnastics star — only I wasn’t the star she had in mind. Back when Mom had put then – three-year-old Arielle in classes, my older sister had been so focused and talented that Mom was sure she’d become an elite gymnast one day. And if there’d been enough money to go around, Arielle might’ve been the one to mount those uneven bars in London. “Arielle was on her way to becoming a phenomenal gymnast,” Mom recalls. “I just wish I had enough money to take her all the way.” Now can you see why I always give so much credit to my big sister? Even though she didn’t get to pursue her original passion, Arielle was one of my loudest cheerers in the stands when I represented the USA in the 2012 Olympics. But that’s getting way ahead of the story.

  Let’s circle back to the fall day in October 2002 that Mom loaded us into her car and drove us down to Gymstrada, a local training center that offers recreational gym classes. In October 2000, when we returned to Virginia, Mom had found a job in the recovery department at Household International (now HSBC), so she had enough extra cash to even consider handing over money for classes. Mom initially signed up all four of us for gymnastics lessons — the idea was to keep us in one spot! — but that didn’t quite work out. Arielle had a passion for gymnastics, of course, but by this time, she was already thirteen — and she felt she was too old to start a serious competitive gymnastics career. So Arielle took a tumbling class and used the skills she learned to rock her moves as a competitive cheerleader on the squad of American Cheer Elite (ACE). Later, Mom let her follow her coaches from ACE when they started another competitive squad called Fame All Stars. Joyelle didn’t like doing gymnastics at all and decided to try ice skating; she absolutely loved it and excelled quickly. John enjoyed the tumbling at Gymstrada; he just didn’t want to be a male gymnast. Instead, he wanted to spend his time on the field playing tag football with the neighborhood recreation league. And me? Well, the day I stepped through the front doors of Gymstrada as a six-year-old, I instantly knew what I still know to this day: I was in exactly the right place.

  “Come back here, Brie!” Mom called out as I dashed onto the gym floor and did over splits. I was a real showoff back then. Before the handful of other students had even gathered, I leapt around that gym in my (cute!) blue leotard (nicknamed a leo) and did every single trick I’d learned from Arielle. “You need to stay put until class begins,” Mom warned, but I was way too excited to wait. At home, I did all my flipping and tumbling in a small space, so you can imagine how I felt when I walked into Gymstrada — an enormous room with lots of beams, bars, and trampolines for me to play on. In retrospect, the gym really wasn’t all that big — but when you’re six, everything seems gigantic. When I finished the trial class that day, I had just one question for Mom: “Do I get to come back?” The answer was yes — and a lot more frequently than even Mom had anticipated.

  “Is this your daughter?” Gymstrada’s owner asked my mom after my first session. He tilted his head in my direction, and Mom nodded yes. “How much gymnastics training has she had?” My mother paused, then formed the number zero with her right fist, which she put up to her right eye. “Are you kidding me?” he said, furrowing his brow. “Your daughter has too much raw talent for just a Saturday recreational class.” So that afternoon, Mom signed me up for a different schedule — gymnastics lessons every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday for a total of six hours each week.

  That same fall, the owner launched a pilot program called TOPs — that’s short for Talent Opportunity Program. TOPs is affiliated with USA Gymnastics (USAG), the organization that oversees gymnastics in America. So when you participate in TOPs, that automatically puts you on the radar of USAG’s national staff. And if a young gymnast has her heart set on competing in the Olympics one day — wink, wink! — having the TOPs connection can be very beneficial. Though I had no clue what earning a gold medal was all about (at that age, I just wanted to jump around), I still took my spot in TOPs.

  I don’t believe in coincidence. So when I look back on all the experiences that led to my first day at Gymstrada, I can definitely see how the Lord put me on the path that He designed for me. Who could’ve predicted that I’d go from being a scrawny baby on the floor of a Dodge van to being the bounciest kid in my family? And besides that, who knew that having ants in my pants would prompt Mom to enroll me in gymnastics? Oh, that’s right — God knew. He still always does.

  The Safe Spot

  I don’t recall much about my parents’ divorce — the first time they split, I was only four. After Mom and us kids returned to Virginia from Texas, Dad eventually came back there too.

  For several months, John, Joyelle, and I lived with my father at his parents’ home in Chesapeake. Dad’s father owned a small neighborhood restaurant. Sometimes, our whole family would go there to have dinner together. “Come sit right here, baby,” Dad would say. Each time I climbed up into my father’s lap, I felt safe and loved.

  Our dad quoted a lot of Scripture. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” we’d sometimes hear him recite. Other times, he’d say things like, “Satan is just trying to get to me.” My dad’s father was a minister, and though my grandfather hadn’t yet pastored a church of his own at that time, he encouraged my dad to go to Bible school and get into ministry. Dad followed that path. Once he finished high school in 1984, my father went to Bible school for three years. He graduated and then enlisted in the Virginia Air National Guard Reserves Unit. About six years later, in the fall of 1990, he and my mother met at Rock Church International in Virginia Beach. They dated for eight months before they exchanged their vows.

  In my young eyes, my dad was everything a father should be. He was a Christian. He was a gentleman. He was handsome. And as far as I could tell, he could fix just about anything around the house — from a leaky faucet to a crack in the floor or wall. “Dad,” I once told him, “I want to marry a guy just like you when I grow up.” My father looked at me, smiled, and then reached down to pull me up into his broad arms.

  Chapter Three

  But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.

  —MATTHEW 6:20, NIV

  I CAN STILL REMEMBER THE WAY THEY SPARKLED! TWO TINY, PERFECTLY rounded quarter-carat diamond earrings. In 2002, when I was almost seven, Mom surprised me with the earrings for Christmas — the first Christmas that she’d had enough money to purchase one special gift for each of her children. When I cracked open the lid of the black velvety box, the earrings stared back at me like a pair of glistening eyes. I cherished those diamond studs even more than I did my favorite gym leo — and that’s saying a lot.

  “Brie, can I wear your earrings today?” one of my sisters asked me one morning before school. (I won’t be a snitch and tell you which sister it was, but here’s a small hint: the first part of her name rhymes with toy.) “Absolutely not,” I said as I tied up my shoes and marched out of the room we shared.

  I thought that was the last of it — until I got to school and noticed my sister actually wearing my most prized possession. That morning after I’d left the room, she’d sneaked into my jewelry box and taken my diamonds. When I caught her flashing them, she began pleading with me to let her keep them on during recess.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “But I promise I’ll take very good care of them,” she said in a voice that softened my heart a little.

  “Okay,” I reluctantly agreed. “Let’s pinky promise on that.” We lifted our pinky fingers and wrapped them around one another. Done deal. We then went off to our own classes until recess — which is when the drama really unfolded.

  “Where’s the other earring?” I’d just spotted my sister skipping back from the playground toward her classroom — and her left ear was diamondless. “Huh?” she said. She reached up to grab her earlobe, and her eyes widen
ed at the realization that the earring was indeed missing. “I’m so sorry, Brie!” she shrieked. “I must’ve lost it during recess.” I felt my heartbeat speed up as I glared at my sister. “This is the last time you’ll ever borrow my stuff!” I shouted. As she slumped back to her class, I raced onto the playground. I was going to find that diamond.

  For the next hour, instead of playing with the other kids in my class, I dug through every handful of dirt on that playground. As I crouched down on my knees and dragged my fingers through the brown mulch, hot tears slid from my lids and crashed onto the earth underneath me. “Where is it?” I repeated to myself as I dug. “It has to be here!”

  But it wasn’t.

  And a few hours later, when I left school and went to Gymstrada for my training session, I was still completely heartbroken about those earrings. Do you know how much I adored those diamonds? As much as some women love their purses and some men love their cars. And if you multiply that love by two, you’ll have some idea of what I was feeling. In a word, furious.

  “How are you today?” my coach asked when I arrived at the gym. “Okay,” I mumbled. I wasn’t exactly okay, of course. But when you’re a serious gymnast in training mode, you learn one thing pretty early: You have to set everything else aside and focus. One hundred percent. Even when you’re a first grader who just parted with some major bling. That’s why I simply slid into the splits that afternoon, prayed for a little extra strength, and did my very best to hold back more tears. And as surprising as it may sound, I already loved the sport so much that it cheered me up. I rarely wanted to miss a day of training — even if I was sick. Once, when I had a temperature of 103 degrees, the coach was like, “You need to go home, Gabrielle.” After my mother picked me up, I said, “I’m gonna get behind!” Thank goodness I had a mom who insisted that I stay healthy — because all I knew is that I wanted to master my back layout step-out.