Grace, Gold, and Glory Read online

  There was a lot to cheer about during those Olympic games. In the team finals we were trying to watch that night, the US women earned a silver medal behind China and in front of Romania. Then the women’s team made history in the individual all-around competition a few days later when Nastia Liukin won the gold and Shawn Johnson seized the silver. The night that event aired, my family gathered at a friend’s home for an Olympic viewing party. It was the first time the United States had claimed the top two medals for the same event. Yet it wasn’t just the masterfully executed skills that caught my attention during the Beijing Olympics. It was one specific moment that happened on the sidelines.

  For balance beam finals, both Shawn and Nastia had qualified, and Shawn took her spot on the balance beam early in the competition. Shawn’s routine was awesome — from the full twisting back somersault and tuck back to the round-off with full twisting double back dismount. I was in awe of how she performed so well under pressure. Nothing seemed to get to her. When Shawn saw her score of 16.225, her face lit up — but would it be enough to keep her in the lead?

  Later, Nastia’s amazing beam routine brought her a score of 16.025. As graceful and powerful as Nastia’s exercise was, her score was just shy of what she needed to land her on the top of the podium; she took the silver. When the final scoreboard showed Shawn’s name in the number-one spot for beam finals, she and her coach embraced each other with a warmth and ease that made such an impression on me. That’s the exact moment when I fell in love with Liang Chow, a man I’d never even met.

  “That’s my coach, Mom!” I announced. She just nodded and smiled with an expression that said, “Child, do you know that man lives on the other side of the country?” But I could feel it in my bones. Chow was the one.

  “Stop playing inside this house.” For months, my sister Arielle had repeated that sentence to Joyelle, John, and me — and for months, we hadn’t listened to a word of it. “You’re going to mess around and break something one day,” she warned. We pretended to see her point, but the second she was out the door, the three of us went wild.

  One afternoon while Mom and Arielle were away, we pulled out our giant, purplish-blue bouncy ball. “Let’s play catch!” I said. I threw the ball at Joyelle; she caught it and hurled it over at John. Just as John was kicking the ball in my direction, the ball smashed right into our living room coffee table and made its legs wobble. And what was on top of that table? Arielle’s most treasured possession — the multicolored pet fish she called Rainbow. “Oh my gosh!” the three of us shouted in unison. As the table tilted toward the floor, water from the small fish tank spread in every direction, all over our light-brown carpet. I raced over to the closet where Rainbow’s quivering body had been thrown. John rushed over to the kitchen sink with the fish tank and refilled it with water, while Joy and I tried to scoop the wiggling fish into our palms.

  “Hurry up, and put him back in the water!” I yelled. We did — just in time to keep him alive. We then thoroughly wiped down the carpet so that the huge water spot wouldn’t be so noticeable.

  Later that evening, Arielle came home to find the three of us lined up on the sofa, sitting perfectly still. “I see that I’m finally getting through to you about playing in this house,” she said with a smirk. Seconds later, she walked over to the bowl and took a look at her fish. “What’s this?” she said. A piece of brown carpet lint was stuck to Rainbow’s tail. “Why is my fish so dirty?” I let out a little giggle but didn’t say a word.

  By night’s end, our little secret became too much for us to bear, so we all filed into Arielle’s room. “We have something to tell you,” I said, looking down at the floor. “We’re so sorry we almost killed Rainbow.”

  “I knew it!” said Arielle, who chuckled when we gave her all the details of the panicky scene. “This is why I kept telling y’all to stop playing in here!” And just like that, with a half smile, she let it go. That might’ve been a little easier to do since her fish was actually still alive, but hey, forgiveness is forgiveness, right? A big sister with an even bigger heart — I wish everyone in the world had one of those.

  The Fishing Trip

  My father loves to fish. One evening when I was thirteen, Dad took me, Joy, and John on a fishing trip near Chesapeake. The three of us cast our lines into the water and waited. John and Joy caught one fish. Then another. Then another. But after nearly an hour, I hadn’t reeled in a single fish.

  “Dad, I’m not catching anything,” I said, fighting back tears.

  “Let me see your rod,” he said. He pulled it in and noticed something I’d clearly missed.

  “There’s no bait on the hook!” he said, chuckling. “How can you catch any fish without bait?” He then showed me how to attach my bait, and we cast my line back out into the water.

  Within minutes, I was beside myself with excitement. “Dad,” I said, “I caught my first fish, Dad!”

  “That’s great, Scooter,” Dad said, beaming. “I’m proud of you.”

  How I longed to hear those very words in years already gone by— and in others to come.

  Chapter Ten

  Fractures well cured make us more strong.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  MOM AND I SAT TOGETHER IN A BOOTH IN RUBY TUESDAY’S RESTAURANT on Newtown Road and stared down at her phone on the tabletop. All day, we’d been expecting a call from my pediatrician, Dr. Robert Fink. Before the first ring was even complete, Mom picked up the cell and pressed the receiver to her ear. The way she furrowed her brow told me the news wasn’t good.

  After what seemed like forever, Mom thanked the doctor, hung up, and then looked straight at me without saying a word.

  “Mom, what did the doctor say?”

  Silence.

  “Mom, what did he SAY?!” I pleaded.

  More silence.

  “Mom, please!”

  She finally repeated the conversation for me. “I’m so sorry,” he’d said, “but there is no way Gabrielle can compete at her upcoming meet. She will be out for a while.” He referred Mom to an orthopedic surgeon for follow-up care.

  I bawled. “But what about my competitions?” I shrieked between sobs. “I can’t be away for ten whole weeks!” The U.S. Classics were less than a month away, and that competition would be followed by one of the biggest of my career — the Junior Olympic National Championships in August 2009. I was devastated by the thought of sitting on the sidelines — yet even scarier was the possibility of ending my entire career.

  When my mother heard the results, she was livid. Injuries happen a lot in my sport — but Mom knew it was my coach’s job to make sure I wasn’t hurting myself by training too much. Mom also knew just how strongly I’d been bitten by the Olympic bug — and the upcoming National Championship was an important step along the path to that dream. “I’m so sorry, Brie,” Mom said as tears threatened to overflow her lower lids. We both then held onto each other in that restaurant and cried our eyes out. Mom rubbed my back as I sobbed into her shirt sleeve, but I was inconsolable. “You want the chocolate brownie sundae you ordered?” the waiter asked, with a look on his face that said, “I know I’m interrupting something important.” I shook my head no. Neither of us was in the mood for chocolate after all.

  When we visited the orthopedic surgeon, the news got worse. “It looks like Gabrielle has a stress fracture in a growth plate in her wrist,” the surgeon said. “It’s the result of overtraining and overuse. If she doesn’t stop training for at least ten weeks, she’ll risk a permanent injury that could end her career.”

  I’d first felt the pain in my wrist a week earlier, and I had prayed that it would just go away on its own. When it didn’t, I told Mom, who immediately scheduled an appointment with my pediatrician. It couldn’t be that bad, I thought as the doctor took the X-rays. It’s probably just a minor sprain. Clearly, I’d been wrong.

  That weekend, I moped around the house in my PJs. Mom and my coach made the final decision: I wouldn’t compete in the U.S.
Classics in July. It just wasn’t worth the risk of further injuring my wrist and putting my career in jeopardy. So even when I did go to the gym, all I could do was conditioning and legwork — skills that didn’t require the use of my wrist.

  “What about the National Championship in August? Is there any chance I’ll be healed by then?” I asked my mother.

  Mom paused before she gave me her answer. “Brie Baby,” she said, “I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Eight and a half weeks into my recovery time from the stress fracture, my wrist began feeling better — much better. But my orthopedic surgeon didn’t want to hear a peep about me competing. “Give yourself time to heal,” he insisted. “You’re not ready.” But he agreed to do another test anyway to check on my progress.

  What the surgeon discovered astounded even him. When he compared the X-ray of my fractured wrist with the X-ray of my healthy wrist, he couldn’t even tell which one had been injured! “I still want you to be careful,” he warned. “Work your way back into training slowly.” Those are the words he said, but what I heard was, “You can compete in the National Championship.”

  So the following day, I began training again on beam. I also practiced some modified floor routines — but I stayed away from the vault and bar. Even though I’d had very minimal training once the championship rolled around, Coach Gustavo decided to let me compete on floor and beam.

  Day one of the meet was a disaster; during my first tumbling pass on my floor routine, I crashed terribly. “I don’t think I was prepared enough,” I told Mom afterward. She agreed, and so did my coach — which is why I opted out of my floor exercise on the second day of competition. My balance beam routine gave me a chance to redeem myself — but after a falter, the best I could pull off was fifth place.

  The first time I tasted a funnel cake, I was smitten. When Arielle, Joyelle, John, and I were small, Mom used to take us to the Busch Gardens amusement park in Williamsburg, Virginia, a place where funnel cake stands abounded. I can practically still smell the aroma of the warm, round pieces of golden dough, sprinkled with powdered sugar and extra crispy around the edges. Joyelle and I were hooked.

  “Mom, can you make us some funnel cakes?” we’d ask every few months. “Maybe some other time,” she always answered. But “some other time” never seemed to roll around, even though we found a recipe online and printed it out for her. So late one night, when Joy and I were craving a funnel cake, we got a bright idea: we’d sneak into the kitchen to make our own.

  Mom didn’t like us to use the stove — especially when she wasn’t there to oversee us. But since it was nearly midnight, Mom was fast asleep. We slid out of bed, found the recipe we’d printed, and tiptoed into the kitchen. In the dark, we gathered the ingredients on the countertop. Flour? Check. Milk and eggs? Double check. Sugar, vegetable oil, and vanilla extract? Triple check.

  “Did you see that?” Joyelle said.

  “Did I see what?” I whispered back.

  “It’s a spider!” Joyelle flipped on the lights as we both tried to squelch our shrieks so we wouldn’t awaken Mom. Since my sister was the older, braver one, she grabbed an old shoe that was sitting at the front doorway and hit the black spider with it. “I got him!” she said. We then went back to work on our project — this time, with the lights on.

  Joyelle measured out each of our ingredients and poured them into the big bowl I was holding. Using a wooden spoon, she mixed everything together. With each stir, the thick mix began looking a lot less like cake batter — and a lot more like bread dough.

  “I think we did something wrong,” I told Joyelle. As we glanced back over the recipe, the mistake popped out at us: Joyelle had put in two cups of sugar instead of two tablespoons of sugar.

  “Let’s just double it,” Joyelle said. I nodded in agreement.

  In less than a minute, it became clear that we hadn’t fixed our mess — we’d multiplied it. Our bowl overflowed with a big, sugary mass of dough! But since we’d already gotten this far, we figured we might as well take the last step: frying up the batter. I turned on the electric stove while Joyelle tilted the bottle of cooking oil toward the skillet and poured.

  “Do you think that’s enough?” she asked.

  “That looks about right,” I answered. We let the oil heat up for about five minutes until it started to form bubbles. Perfect. We then pulled a small piece of dough off the glob and formed a thin, round cake. I placed it into the oil.

  What happened next? Not much. After the heavy dough sank to the bottom of the skillet, it just lay there and soaked up the oil.

  “Should the oil be hotter?” Joy finally asked.

  Bingo — so I turned up the knob on the stove. Three minutes later, we didn’t have a funnel cake — but we did have some kind of deformed pancake!

  “We really screwed this up!” Joyelle whispered.

  Before escaping back to bed, we did away with our evidence. Joyelle wiped down the counter and stovetop, while I put away the remaining ingredients and quietly washed our dishes. And what did we do with the mass of leftover dough? We dropped it into a big plastic bag and put it at the bottom of the trashcan. After one final look around the kitchen, we tiptoed back to our room.

  Mom never found out about our funnel cake fiasco — or at least Joyelle and I don’t think she did. Our mother has a funny way of acting like she doesn’t notice something — but then five years later, we discover that she was on to us all along!

  Later that same year, Mom got sick. Extremely sick. She became ill after she took some prescription medication. Her adverse reaction to that medication was so severe that my sisters, brother, and I were sure we would lose her.

  “The doctors are putting me on a medical leave from my job,” Mom told us one evening when she’d gathered us in her bedroom. “I just need some time to recover.” Her condition wasn’t life threatening, but she was in so much pain that she certainly felt like she was near death — and we thought so too. To this day, I have never been more scared.

  The following months were not only an emotional roller coaster, they became a financial one. When Mom began her medical leave, it took three months for her to receive disability pay. For the first month, we lived on the little savings Mom had socked away in the bank. “God will provide,” she assured us, but we could tell that even she was a little nervous about how we would survive.

  Back in 2006, after my parents separated, our mother began receiving steady child support payments from my father, who went on active military duty for a time. But when those payments suddenly stopped without a warning a year and a half later, we were back to praying our way from one paycheck to the next. When Mom got down to the last $3 in her checking account, she knew she had to do something drastic. So she pulled out the most valuable piece of jewelry she’d ever owned, a half-carat diamond ring in a custom setting, and took it down to the pawn shop. Once there, she slowly opened the door, made her way to the counter, and set out the ring. “How much can I get for this?” she asked. The store owner picked up the ring and examined it before he finally gave her an estimate: $750. That was barely enough to get us through the second month of Mom’s medical leave.

  By the third month, our situation had grown worse. We literally had no money for groceries. Our last gallon of milk sat nearly empty in the fridge next to a half carton of eggs. Our mother — a proud woman who has always worked so tirelessly to provide for us — has a very hard time asking for help. But this time, we were desperate for it.

  “I had either sold or pawned every possession of value that we had, and there was just no money left,” she recalls of that time. “That’s when I knew I had to do the one thing that I have never ever wanted to do: I had to go on food stamps.” So one morning, Mom gathered up all the strength she could muster to lift herself out of bed, get dressed, and drive down to the Social Services office on Virginia Beach Boulevard. “I cried so many tears because I couldn’t believe I’d found myself in this predicament,�
� she says. “But I did what I had to do to make sure my children could eat.” That month and for dozens of others to follow, we did eat — but only by the grace of God.

  Even while Mom was on medical leave, she scrambled to keep money flowing. A friend told her about a slimming body garment called “Body Magic,” an item Mom could sell online. “It’ll produce immediate revenue,” the friend assured her, “because everyone wants to look good in their clothes.” When Mom got her own garment in the mail, she tried it on — and it took all four of us kids to help her get into that thing! John wasn’t happy at all about having to fasten the hooks on the front of the slimmer. “Men aren’t supposed to be doing this sort of thing, Mom!” he joked. But Mom was desperate enough to try anything. Once she was convinced that this was a legitimate business opportunity involving a product that worked as advertised, she began selling the garments. She used that income to keep the utilities paid — but she didn’t have enough to cover the mortgage.

  Many years ago, food stamps were actual stamps, but they’ve since been replaced by a debit-like card. Each time we went to the grocery store, my mother felt ashamed to pull out that card. We once ran into one of Mom’s former coworkers — and Mom was so afraid that woman would spot the card that she actually got out of line. “You can go ahead of us,” she told the woman. “We forgot something.”

  Our mother then pushed the cart to the back of the store and pretended she was getting some orange juice. In the meantime, my siblings and I secretly checked to see if the woman had left the store. “Is she gone yet?” Mom asked. When the woman finally rolled her grocery cart out the front door, we returned to the line. Even still, Mom looked around slowly before she pulled out the card. The debit card had just enough on it to cover the milk and bread — but never enough to erase Mom’s feeling of humiliation.