Grace, Gold, and Glory Page 6

  For a long time, I kept everything inside. My family was already giving up so much for me to be a gymnast, and I didn’t want to burden Mom with one more thing. I also didn’t want to start a big drama with the other girls by bringing it up to my coaches. I knew that would make the other gymnasts dislike me even more. In competitive gymnastics, you’re taught to be strong and handle whatever might stand in the way of your training. So because I loved my sport so much — and because I didn’t want to seem like a tattletale — I just dealt with my feelings of isolation.

  Yet ignoring the situation didn’t make it disappear. There were certain tasks my teammates and I took turns doing before we started training, and one day it was one of the other gymnast’s turn to scrape all the excess chalk off the uneven bars. That’s when the girl said, “Why doesn’t Gabby do it? She’s our slave.” I looked over to see the girl standing there with this smirk on her face. I could feel my stomach muscles tighten and my heart sink. I wanted to cry — but I didn’t. Instead, I just stared at her.

  “That’s not cool,” another gymnast said to the girl.

  “Well, you make jokes all the time too,” the girl shot back.

  “I do,” the other gymnast said, “but not that kind of joke. You should never joke about something like that.”

  When I got home that evening, all my pent-up emotion came pouring out. I shut the door to my bedroom and prayed. “God, what did I do to deserve that comment?” I said between sobs. “And why are they being so mean to me?” Later, when Mom arrived home from work, she asked how my day went. “Fine,” I fibbed. Not until much later did I find the courage to tell her the whole story.

  Especially during this time, my strong friendship with Kaiya became a lifeline.

  “Did you finish your math homework yet?” she asked me one afternoon. I hated math — and she knew it — so we both let out a you-know-better-than-that giggle. Kaiya and I were both homeschooled — after I finished second grade at Holland Elementary, I did homeschool from third grade on. For a competitive gymnast, homeschool is often more like gym school — in between my training time, I followed an online curriculum. During my first year in homeschool, I used a book curriculum called A Beka, the same one used at Greenhill Farms Academy. The second year, my mom moved me onto Alpha Omega, a CD/book interactive program.

  As part of the homeschool life, parents provided their children with laptops — the first MacBook Mom got me was white! On-site tutors (and my mother, of course) guided me through the material and helped me with any homework I didn’t understand. At Excalibur, I trained from eight to noon and then from two thirty to five o’clock, which meant I did my schoolwork between noon and two thirty — not a lot of time to mess around! At night when I came home from the gym, I did more homework. But sometimes I was too exhausted from all that training to touch a book.

  Kaiya was a little older than me. So even though she could help me with my homework, I was zero help to her. (Sorry, Kaiya!) Maybe I couldn’t solve her biology problems, but I could provide a little comic relief —and we laughed constantly. Sometimes, we pretended we were in real school and passed silly notes back and forth to each other. The teacher who was handling that subject for our group would overhear us whispering and say, “Get to work, you two!” — and that usually made us laugh even harder.

  In addition to history, I enjoyed science. Why? Because I got to do experiments and mix chemicals and make bubbles — and I could use the concoctions to pull pranks on my sisters and brother … ha, ha, just kidding! I also loved speech class. When I was small, I couldn’t say the word rabbit — I pronounced it as wabbit. By the end of that class, my teacher had corrected my pronunciation — plus, she gave me a lot of cool stuff, like a coupon for a free pizza in the café. My all-time favorite teacher was Mr. Dule, a bald-headed African American man. He was so intense. In his PE class, I ripped my way up the hanging rope with such a fast speed; I then cranked out pull-ups like there was no tomorrow. He was in awe of my strength. He set up a lot of fun obstacle courses for our class, and sometimes, he even joined in to finish the course with us. Because I had gymnastics training, the whole class was easy as pie!

  We hardly ever got snow in Virginia Beach. So on the few occasions when the glistening flakes fell from the heavens and blanketed our front yard, it felt like a holiday for my siblings and me. One winter, we’d all been dreaming of a white Christmas. Our dream came true a little late: on a January morning, we awakened to snowfall.

  “Look, Joy!” I squealed when I spotted the flakes though a window early that morning. “It’s snowing!” My sister and I shared the bottom bunk, and John slept in the bunk above. Joy and I were so excited about the snow that we woke him up with our shrieks. Before Mom or Arielle could stumble out of bed, the three of us raced to put on our clothes and shoes. We then pulled on our heavy coats (the ones with the fur trim around the hood) and dashed out the back door.

  Outside, we started a game we made up — a combination of tag and hide and go seek. “You’re it!” I yelled at John. He then closed his eyes for a few moments, just long enough for Joyelle and me to find someplace to hide. It didn’t take my brother very long to find me crouched behind the outdoor trampoline.

  “You’re it now, Brie!” he shouted.

  Once we grew tired of our little game, we dropped to our knees and began gathering heaps of what looked like magic stardust. After a few minutes, we’d collected enough to build a medium-sized snowman.

  Mom, who was finally up and having her usual coffee with way too much creamer, called us into the house.

  “Put this outside and let it catch some fresh flakes,” she said, handing us a large plastic bowl. An hour later, the bowl was overflowing with the cleanest, flakiest snow I’ve ever seen. After we’d thrown our last snowballs at each other (I loved sneakily putting chunks of snow down John’s back!), we all dragged ourselves inside in our wet clothes. I handed Mom the bowl.

  “I’m going to make something special for you,” she said. She then mixed the bowl of flakes with a bit of sugar, added a touch of food coloring, and placed a perfectly rounded scoop of her creation into three small paper cups. (We all loved our treat so much that we begged Mom to make it every time it snowed. And as long as there was a homemade snow cone and a game of tag involved, a day in the snow was all we needed.)

  After we’d traded our soaking shirts, jeans, and socks for dry sets, Joyelle and I then settled down in the living room and took out our dolls. One Christmas, Mom surprised me with Yasmin, a Bratz doll. On the Bratz TV series that Joy and I sometimes watched, Yasmin got the nickname Pretty Princess because she once kissed a toy frog.

  “Isn’t she just the cutest?” I said to my sis, who was busy pulling on her doll’s blouse.

  “She is!” Joyelle agreed.

  I loved brushing Yasmin’s hair and dressing her in all those adorable little miniskirts. I also loved her TV show character. On the series, Yasmin loved pets so much that she started an animal rescue program. A doll after my own heart!

  Joyelle and I had quite a few TV show connections, actually. For instance, one of my favorite shows was Wildfire, about a girl named Kris who owns a horse. For years, I dreamed about mounting a horse and riding off on it, deep into the countryside. “I’m gonna get my own horse one day,” I often told Joyelle.

  “Well, I’m going to become a mermaid,” she’d often reply. That’s because we were both into a show called H20: Just Add Water, which was the story of three teenage girls who happened to be Australian mermaids. Whenever we went to the pool, we’d even practice our mermaid swim.

  But many of those games and conversations were during summer — which felt so, so far away during our big snow day that January. Outside our town house, the flakes began falling harder; Arielle was still in bed, snuggled tightly beneath her covers. Our mother brought us one last small homemade snow cone along with a cup of hot chocolate to warm up our hands.

  “Mom, can we go back into the yard?” I begged. I though
t we could upgrade our snowman with a few extra heaps of powder.

  “I don’t want you to catch a cold,” said our mother, always the protective one. “Let’s just enjoy the snow from inside.” Mom and John then squeezed into a spot on our couch next to Joy and me, and we sat aside our dolls. For a few moments that I wish could’ve stretched into eternity, the four of us gazed silently out the window as a flurry of shimmering flakes cascaded toward the ground.

  By now, you’ve probably caught on to something: my mother is always standing by with just the right Scripture or inspirational saying to get me through any tough situation. One of her favorites has always been two verses she used together: “The last will be first, and the first will be last. The LORD will make you the head, not the tail” (Matthew 20:16 and Deuteronomy 28:13, NIV).

  When it came to TOPs, Mom’s words turned out to be prophetic. The first time I tested for TOPs in 2004, I barely qualified at the bottom of the national stack — but hey, at least I made the cut. My second shot came in October 2005, and I landed smack-dab in the middle of my peers around the nation. The following year, I did something that still astounds Mom and my coaches: I not only qualified, but I also had the best score in the nation. Whoa!

  I wanted to keep rising in my sport — but I had no idea that my ascent would be more like a dizzying catapult. I claimed gold in one competition after another … after another … after another. In 2005, I began training and competing at Level 8, and by the following spring, I was in first place at another Virginia State championship. Then in 2007, I rose to Level 9 and claimed the top spot on beam in the State Championships. The following spring, I started training at Level 10.

  The summer I was eleven, I took a huge leap forward: I competed in the USA Challenge Hopes Pre-Elite program and placed first in the all-around. The Hopes Division was created for pre-elite gymnasts between the ages of ten and twelve — those who are on track to eventually move on to the junior elite and senior elite levels. And why is that important? Because once you make it to these highest levels, you’re among that small group of gymnasts who are the very best in the world. That also means you’re good enough to try out for the Olympic team.

  Here’s what I knew by the time I was twelve: something pretty amazing was happening in my life — and it was happening so much faster than me, my coaches, or even my mother could have predicted. Yes, I worked tirelessly at the gym, but so do a lot of gymnasts. So why had God chosen to give me this special gift? Maybe it’s for the same reason that Mom asked us to gather snow — so she could create something really sweet to pass on.

  The Closet

  In 2006, my father left for his second eight-month deployment — this time, he was going to Iraq. A few months after he’d left for his overseas tour, I came home to find my mother packing. She was surrounded by enormous plastic bins, and she was pulling my father’s shirts, pants, and shoes from the closet. Arielle was helping her.

  “Mom, why are you packing Dad’s stuff?” I asked.

  She paused. “I’m just trying to make more room in the closet, Brie,” she said. “Plus, I’m sending more clothes to your dad.”

  Not until years later did Mom tell me why she was really clearing out the closet: that was the very day she and my father had chosen to end their relationship forever. Their first marriage had lasted for nine years. Their second marriage had held together for just over a year, until constant arguments had weakened it beyond repair.

  “I told Mom it wouldn’t work,” Arielle later said to me. At the time, all I knew was my father was never coming back to our town house to live with us. That afternoon, Mom and Arielle filled the plastic bins to overflowing and sealed them as tightly as they could.

  Chapter Nine

  In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  I LIKE MY NOSE. I ALWAYS HAVE. YET A FEW PAINFUL EXPERIENCES I HAD while at Excalibur really shook my confidence for a time — not just in the way my nose looked, but in the way I saw my gymnastics abilities.

  During a typical training session at the gym one afternoon, my teammates and I were making our way through our skills and rotations. When I got about halfway through my exercises for the day, I overheard one of my coaches say something I’ll never forget: “Yeah, she needs a nose job.” He was talking to another coach, but he was definitely looking in my direction.

  A string of thoughts sped through my head. Why would my coach say such a cruel thing about me? Did he mean it? What was wrong with my nose? And why did he make that comment loud enough for me and my teammates to hear it? I was so disturbed by what I heard that my heart felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. I moved quickly through the remaining rotations and went home.

  That night and for a long time afterward, I didn’t tell my mother what happened — for all the same reasons I hadn’t told her about the growing isolation I’d been feeling at the gym. As hurtful as my teammates’ actions had been, this was worse. This time, the insult was coming from someone that I cared about and trusted — a coach who was supposed to have my best interest at heart.

  The offensiveness didn’t end there. A few weeks later, some of my teammates and I were at a party together — one of the social gatherings our coaches sometimes hosted at their homes. The coach who’d insulted me before was there. With me and a few other gymnasts gathered around, that coach turned to me and delivered the same shocking sentence: “You need a nose job.” I stared at him in disbelief for what must’ve been a few seconds — but what felt like a thousand years. A moment later, a couple of my teammates broke the silence with a chuckle. But I didn’t find anything funny. In fact, his comment stung me even more than it had the first time, because he said it directly to me.

  A few days later, the same teammates who’d overheard my coach’s comments brought it up again as a joke. “Your nose is so flat,” one of them said, snickering. “How do you even breathe out of it?” I was so stunned by her words that I all could conjure up in response was a sarcastic, “Thanks, guys.” I then simply turned and walked away.

  Years later, when I finally opened up about these experiences, some people pointed out that I never reported the incidents back when they happened. That’s true. But to fully comprehend why I didn’t speak up, you have to understand the environment I was in. Any competitive gymnast can tell you that we’re taught to be tough from a very young age — to suck it up and keep pressing toward our goal. Sure, if I would’ve revealed the mistreatment, the people involved may have been reprimanded. But if I then stayed at Excalibur, do you think my time there would’ve been easier — or harder? As a twelve-year-old, I reasoned that speaking up would make things more difficult and that would take my focus off perfecting my skills. That’s why I kept the rude comments a secret.

  Yet I couldn’t completely cover up the impact that the words had on me. “Am I pretty, Mom?” I asked my mother one evening about a month after that party.

  “Of course, Brie,” she said. “You’ve always been beautiful.”

  But I was starting to have my doubts. “Was I cute even as a baby?” I pressed.

  “Yes,” she assured me. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I answered. I could tell that Mom suspected something was up, but I didn’t let her pull it out of me until much later.

  Even as I pushed to lift my skill level, my self-assurance sank — and not just because of the cruel comments. My coach and I were butting heads over which skills I should be learning. I wanted to learn more difficult routines with higher start values so that I could stay as competitive as possible; my coach thought I was asking for too much too soon — and he often told me so. Over time, I began to question my capabilities. Does my coach think I’m talented enough to get to the highest levels of my sport? Though I continued to train with him, I knew we weren’t in step with each other.

  So all in all, I went through a tough time at Excalibur. Were there plenty of coaches and gymnasts there who
treated me with respect and love? Of course! And to this day, I appreciate that. I had some wonderful experiences there, I formed a few amazing friendships that I still cherish, and I improved as a gymnast. Yet that doesn’t erase the sting of what I endured. Sometimes, the truth isn’t one viewpoint versus another. It’s both. In the end, I had some great days at Excalibur but I also faced some heartbreaking ones.

  When I look back on it now, I realize I should’ve told Mom sooner about the comments about my nose and some of the other instances of bullying. If she’d known what I was experiencing, she could’ve handled the situation or even considered moving me to another gym. Even when you’re scared — and I truly was! — it’s always the right choice to speak up to an adult who really cares about you. For me, that person will always be Mom.

  I ended my 2008 gymnastics season on a disappointing note. At the U.S. Classics — my first meet as a Junior International Elite gymnast — I came in tenth in all-around and eighth on uneven bars. Not my best meet. Then Mom and Arielle traveled all the way up to Boston to watch me compete in the Junior Visa Championship. I came in sixteenth place and didn’t qualify for the national team. Ugh. Mom was there to comfort me afterward — but in her hotel room, not mine. The place where I was booked was $800 a night — so Mom, who barely had enough to even make the trip, booked the cheapest accommodations she could find. “There’s always going to be another competition,” Mom reassured me after the meet. “Take this as a learning experience and build on it. You’re going to use this as your stepping stone to success.”

  The summer of 2008 brought a bright spot for me: the Beijing Olympics. When my siblings and I gathered around the set to watch the team finals that evening, the TV suddenly went off because of a storm.

  When the screen went dark, I was like, Are you kidding me? “Mom, the power’s out!” I yelled, praying I wouldn’t miss a second of Shawn Johnson’s upcoming performance on beam. I raced into my mother’s room to ask her to check the circuit breaker and discovered Mom’s TV was working just fine for some reason. So I jumped onto the bed and continued watching. My eyeballs were glued to the set. By this time, the dream I first had at age eight had blossomed into an unquenchable passion.