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Off Balance: A Memoir, by Dominique Moceanu
Download PDF Off Balance: A Memoir, by Dominique Moceanu
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In this searing and riveting New York Times bestseller, Olympic gold medalist Dominique Moceanu reveals the dark underbelly of Olympic gymnastics, the true price of success…and the shocking secret about her past and her family that she only learned years later.
At fourteen years old, Dominique Moceanu was the youngest member of the 1996 US Women’s Olympic Gymnastics team, the first and only American women’s team to take gold at the Olympics. Her pixyish appearance and ferocious competitive drive quickly earned her the status of media darling. But behind the fame, the flawless floor routines, and the million-dollar smile, her life was a series of challenges and hardships.
Off Balance vividly delineates each of the dominating characters who contributed to Moceanu’s rise to the top, from her stubborn father and long-suffering mother to her mercurial coach, Bela Karolyi. Here, Moceanu finally shares the haunting stories of competition, her years of hiding injuries and pain out of fear of retribution from her coaches, and how she hit rock bottom after a public battle with her parents.
But medals, murder plots, drugs, and daring escapes aside (all of which figure into Moceanu’s incredible journey), the most unique aspect of her life is the family secret that Moceanu discovers, opening a new and unexpected chapter in her adult life. A mysterious letter from a stranger reveals that she has a second sister—born with a physical disability and given away at birth—who has nonetheless followed in Moceanu’s footsteps in an astonishing way.
A multilayered memoir that transcends the world of sports, Off Balance will touch anyone who has ever dared to dream of a better life.
- Sales Rank: #37571 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-06-12
- Released on: 2012-06-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“A rousing, intimate memoir… relentlessly candid.” (Vogue.com)
About the Author
Dominique Moceanu is the youngest American gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal, and the youngest to win a Senior National All-Around Title. She lives near Cleveland, Ohio. Visit Dominique-Moceanu.com.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Off Balance Chapter 1 SISTERS
When you have traveled the world, won Olympic gold, and gone through a very public court battle against your parents all by the age of seventeen, surprises don’t come easy. Discovering my sister Jennifer, though—that was a surprise.
On December 10, 2007, I found out that I had a second sister. I was nine months pregnant and about to take my college semester finals. With swollen feet and body parts bigger than I had ever imagined possible, I couldn’t even squeeze into a school desk anymore. But earning a college degree was a promise I had made to myself—and third trimester or not, I was going to get those finals done.
Cleveland was cold, rainy, and gray in a bona fide Ohio winter way. All I wanted to do was finish my exams, cuddle up under a blanket with some hot chocolate, and wait for the imminent arrival of my firstborn. But alas, that was not yet in the cards. I was headed for a study session right after a quick stop at the post office.
Earlier in the week, I’d missed the delivery of a piece of certified mail, and the notice had been sitting on my desk for several days. Lugging my backpack full of business textbooks to my car, I felt baby give me a stern kick. I almost lost the certified letter notice in a cold gust of wind and rain. Little did I know, this tiny three-by-five-inch piece of paper would turn my life—past, present, and future—upside down.
As a competitive gymnast, my life has always been filled with challenges that would ultimately define my future. From day one, I was taught to be prepared at all costs. And yet, pulling into the post office parking lot that day, I couldn’t have been more unarmed, unguarded.
After finding my place in line, I did finally wonder who might have sent me a registered letter. Only my family and personal friends used my home address. Looking out a nearby window, I saw that the rain was getting heavier. I needed to get home. I couldn’t afford to dawdle at the post office. The holiday season lines were longer and slower than usual, and I was getting antsy just standing there when I had so much to do. It seemed that everyone but me was sending packages or cards to relatives across the globe.
I finally got to the front of the line, received my package, and walked out into the rain.
As I awkwardly tried to dodge puddles, I stole a peek at the label on the envelope. The bubbly cursive letters seemed so personal, but the name on the return address was completely unfamiliar to me. Back in my car I tore open the package and pulled out a cluster of items: a typed letter, a bundle of photos, and some court documents. Please tell me I am not being sued! Then I caught a glimpse of something familiar on one of the documents—my mother’s and father’s handwriting.
The cover letter was a page and a half of cleanly typed words, unequivocal in meaning, straightforward in sentiment. But my head began to spin as I struggled to make sense of even the simplest words.
I’ve known my whole life that I was adopted … and that my biological last name was Moceanu.
I read the letter slowly—again and again. Breathless and stunned, I sat behind the wheel, staring out the window at the cars driving in and out of the parking lot—a stream of mothers, grandmothers, uncles hurrying in the rain with their holiday packages.
Her name was Jennifer and apparently she was my long-lost sister given up for adoption by my parents in 1987. The letter explained that Jennifer had always known that she was of Romanian heritage, but that it wasn’t until she was turning sixteen that her adoptive parents decided to share the details of her birth. They revealed to her the names of her biological parents, and me, her biological sister. She wrote that she had been waiting four years to contact me directly.
I feel that I have one chance to show you and prove to you that I’m not some crazy person … I’m sure after seeing all of the papers, you’ll see that I’m serious.
Is this possible? I thought. I tried to think back to 1987. I would’ve been six years old when Jennifer was born. Was my mother even pregnant? Why couldn’t I remember? My life has been one bizarre adventure, filled with highs and lows, one headline after another … but a secret sibling? I sat in my car for what seemed like hours, repeatedly examining the contents of the package. The information was presented meticulously, like a jigsaw puzzle, each piece carefully and intentionally placed next to the other. The evidence was overwhelming.
The photographs hit me the hardest. The girl in the images looked exactly like my younger sister, Christina, born in 1989 when I was almost eight years old. Eventually I could see that while it was definitely not Christina, there was no doubt that she was a sister nonetheless—my sister. The resemblance was uncanny.
I have another sister!
How could something like this be kept a secret?
I was an only child for the first eight years of my life. My parents, Romanian immigrants, struggled to provide me a better life than the ones they had left in their homeland. They worked hard to give me every opportunity in life, and once I showed natural talent as a young gymnast, they spent every last penny on my training. My father (“Tata”) often worked several jobs just to meet the financial burden of my escalating coaching and gym costs. My parents even relocated our family from city to city and state to state whenever necessary to meet my evolving gymnastic needs. According to Tata, I was destined for greatness, so I did my best not to disappoint my parents. By the age of seven I was a serious, committed gymnast, and by the age of nine I was receiving national attention and regarded as one of America’s hopefuls. Standing on the podium at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and receiving a gold medal was the crowning jewel in a successful gymnastics career and, most certainly, the confirmation that my parents’ sacrifices were not in vain.
I took another look at the photos, took a deep breath, and called my parents in Houston.
“Hello?” Mama answered groggily.
“Did you give up a baby for adoption in 1987?” I blurted out. I knew I caught her by complete surprise and gave her a morning wake-up call she’d never forget, but sitting in my car, in the rain outside the post office, I needed answers.
Silence.
I felt a strange combination of emotions whirling out of control. I looked at my belly, my unborn baby, while images of my own childhood raced through my head. My parents were devoted to me and worked tirelessly to provide me with everything they possibly could. They wanted me to have every opportunity in life. But what I longed for most in my early childhood was a bigger family—brothers and sisters. The birth of my sister Christina in 1989 was one of the happiest days of my life. I remember Mama bringing her home from the hospital and how everything instantly seemed sweeter. A baby sister—she was everything to me. We did everything together and today remain the closest of friends. How could it be that Mama had another baby before Christina? Another sister? This didn’t make any sense.
“Mama, you have to tell me—is it true?” I pleaded.
“Yes, it’s true,” she said quietly in a voice I hardly recognized. I had been so close with my mother my entire life and truly thought that I knew everything about her. I suddenly felt a distance from her, and I didn’t like it one bit. I couldn’t understand how or why she would keep this from me and Christina. I’d expect something like this from my father, who is a born salesman and a master at gently twisting the truth when it suits his needs. He never had a real need to lie outright, since he could wrap you up in his stories in a heartbeat. What he omitted was oftentimes more telling and more important than what he actually said. But not my mother. Mama was a straight shooter, honest to the core. Or at least, that’s the Mama I knew.
“How could you have kept this from me?” I cried into the phone, both of us knowing there was no possible answer that would satisfy me. Tears flowed down my face; the floodgates had opened and I couldn’t stop. I was a complete mess.
I heard my mother crying on the other end of the phone, too. Mama has always been my rock and confidante, and her pain has always been my pain. But at that moment, I felt a total disconnect, which made me feel confused, angry, and alone.
I had so many questions, so few answers. My emotions were running in every direction, moving so quickly I could barely keep up. The raindrops hit the car roof like little metal hammers.
I felt paralyzed, retracing the steps of my life. Every photo ever taken, every holiday spent, all of our childhood memories—there should’ve been three sisters. My life reshuffled, restructured in a matter of minutes.
Just like that, with the rip of an envelope, I had a sister and her name was Jennifer. She was born October 1, 1987, the day after my birthday. We are exactly six years and one day apart.
Jennifer would have been the middle sister. Why was she given up for adoption when Christina and I were allowed to stay?
Jennifer had provided contact information, and I was tempted to call her right away, but first I had to learn more. Anyway, I was in no mental state to talk at that point.
“I wanted to tell you, and I almost did many times. I just couldn’t find the words,” said Mama.
I was disappointed for so many reasons, but most of all I felt betrayed that she had kept this from me all these years. She had been the one I could trust and the one I relied on to always tell me the truth. I felt angry, sad, deceived, and vulnerable. I had always been open with Mama and confided in her things I have never shared with anyone else. And prior to receiving Jennifer’s letter, I had thought she had done the same with me.
Even though my mother had kept this from me, at least I was able to communicate with her. As for my father, I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him for several weeks; I knew, deep down, that he was likely responsible for how things were handled, or mishandled. After all, he had played a key role in virtually all the most painful moments in my life up to then.
My father was not a man of the modern age, and even though he loved the United States, he was very much an old-school Romanian. As a father and husband, he ruled our house with an iron fist. Decisions were made by him, obeyed by us, and explained by nobody. To question my father’s reasoning as a child was invitation for punishment, and as an adult was invitation for outbursts.
Starting with my teenage years, I had clashed with my father many times but had never really been angry with my mother, not in this way. I always felt sorry for my mother; she had such a difficult marriage and wasn’t treated the way I believed a wife should be treated—with love and respect.
My home life throughout my childhood was turbulent, at best. Tata’s rage and temper tantrums took a toll on my family. We often found ourselves hiding in separate rooms. I can barely recall a single holiday when my father didn’t make a scene or create some kind of chaos. We were always walking on eggshells. As a child, I never understood his rage, and I still struggle to understand why he did such horrible things to the family he was supposed to love.
But things had started to soften between my father and me at the time I received Jennifer’s package. We still clashed on many issues, but his battle with a rare form of eye cancer had significantly shifted the dynamics of our relationship. He took a big leap when he allowed himself to get emotional and melancholy in my presence. However, all the old feelings of frustration and alienation returned when I discovered that he and my mother had kept this huge secret from me for twenty years.
Despite being physically weakened by the cancer treatment, my father’s retelling of Jennifer’s birth was matter-of-fact and decidedly old-school.
“You must remember, Dominique, we were very poor, struggling to survive and put food on the table. When she was born, the doctors told me that we wouldn’t be able to afford her medical bills. I saw her, and she was born with no legs. We had no money and no insurance. We could barely take care of ourselves and you.”
No legs?! What does that mean, no legs? I thought. My father had a knack for embellishing, so I never quite knew what to believe.
“That’s what I remember.”
And that was it. Nothing more. I’m sure the finer details after twenty years in the vault were a little fuzzy, but I expected more—something, anything. I needed more of the story, more pieces to a puzzle that was becoming more confusing with each new detail, but my father had said his piece and offered no more.
Once again, it was my mother who tried to help me understand.
“I was given an ultrasound,” she began. “It was the only ultrasound of my entire pregnancy. We had no insurance and I had not even seen a doctor prior to delivery. I saw the way the technicians looked at the ultrasound, and I knew something was wrong, but they would not say a word, and I left the clinic with no one ever explaining what they saw. I remember feeling scared and uneasy, but tried not to worry. Months later, when I went into the hospital to deliver the baby, they took me to the operation room to perform a C-section. I was without your father, and it seemed as though they put me to sleep with anesthesia almost immediately. All I remember was waking up in a fog—and with no new baby. Your father said that our little girl was born with no legs. I never saw my baby. I never held her, never touched her, never even smelled her. I desperately wanted to, but your father told me we had to give her up and that was that. We never looked back because it was too painful. You know your father—once a decision is made, that’s the end of it.
“He never asked me how I felt after all of that happened. It was such a horrible time in my life. After I came back from the hospital I cried for a very long time in the emptiness of the streets. No one even noticed my sadness.”
It seems crazy and tragic that this could happen in the United States in the 1980s, but in my family’s universe, it made sense. My father controlled my mother; every meaningful decision was made by him alone. She had no friends or family in this country and spoke limited English. My mother depended entirely on him, and that’s how he liked it.
My mother spent twenty years hiding the pain and agony of this secret, but on December 10, 2007, it finally came out.
Tormented, betrayed, and still in shock, I knew I had to contact Jennifer.
Most helpful customer reviews
87 of 89 people found the following review helpful.
Solid Memoir - Answers Questions for Fans and Makes People Think
By Joe
A memoir is the story of a person's life and their experiences and no one should be entitled to review that. Accordingly, this review focuses only on how the information is presented and whether the audience of potential buyers would take an interest in it.
As fans of celebrities we pick up on a person during or after their major achievements. In the case of Moceanu (for most) this would be 1996 when she and the U.S. Woman's team won a gold medal in the team competition for gymnastics. She was just 14 years old. I assumed it took a lot of hard work to get there, and that the path was not easy. I also assumed that it was a childhood lost and replaced with the hard work and determination of an adult. This book certainly confirms these theories. I feel I can write this without it being a real spoiler for anyone.
We (the public) see the glorious results and have some appreciation for how difficult it is to achieve the results, but no true understanding. This memoir humanizes Moceanu's achievements and it does it in an incredibly well thought out and touching way. For example, most fans knew her family was Romanian - but probably few considered what that truly meant. It meant that Moceanu is a first generation American who came from a poor family of immigrants... a family which had a financially unsteady situation. It may be hard enough to achieve greatness, but it is even harder living in a two-bedroom apartment with your parents, sister and grandparents. Most great gymnasts tend to be on the small side, but have any fans considered what it is like to be the smallest person in your class selected last to play a sport in gym class, have a funny sounding name and come to school with food that is unlike your classmates' food at lunch time? No one imagines the small tiny hardships that add up to a difficult life when they see a girl and a gold medal on a podium in front of the entire world. This memoir helps you to relate to Moceanu as a human - a young girl who faced kids in school as cruel as the ones you went to school with, but she faced them with much more adversity than most of us did in our own lives.
It is a poorly kept secret that elite child athletes often face abuse (which comes in multiple forms: physical, mental, emotional). Gymnastics seems to be particularly notorious for this. What I appreciate about this memoir is that it reads like someone trying to tell a story as a way of explaining their life... and not like someone who has an ax to grind. Many memoirs are "grinding axes" in disguise, but fortunately this does not come off as one of them in my opinion.
Moceanu does a great job reflecting on what was great in her childhood and what she appreciated about her life as well as noting things she has set out to change about her own children's childhood. It also brings an additional remarkable component about her lost sister and how the discovery altered everything she knew and perceived about her family which, frankly, was already enough for ten lifetimes!
If I had one criticism of the book it is the way in which the chronology was broken up to weave past and current together (i.e. the story of her lost sister). It was awkward to follow and I think the reader's feeling of being disjointed outweighed what Moceanu was probably going for by doing it. This is a small issue mentioned only because no product review should fail to mention "the negative".
The story is remarkable and inspiring, there is no question of that. It is told well and with great detail that takes a lot of courage to share with other human beings (let alone publish in a book). You do feel that you are a better person for having understood the path someone else experienced in life and the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned. You can not ask for more after reading a memoir. Highly recommended.
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
What a remarkable woman!
By Gabi
I've been a fan of Dominique's for as long as I can remember. Living in Brazil, it wasn't always easy to follow her career in a time when we didn't have youtube, facebook or twitter... I grew up watching her perform in the world's most prestigious competitions, and ultimately watched her become an Olympic Champion in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. What I loved most about her was that big, beautiful smile she flashed to the audience and the cameras whenever she was performing that just made everything look so easy and effortless! I guess that's why America and the world fell in love with her. But little did we know that behind all that, there was a terrified little girl who was being physically, emotionally and mentally abused and humiliated by the very people who were supposed to love, care and protect her.
This book does a great job in telling the whole story from Dominique's point of view maybe for the first time ever. She's blunt honest, straight forward in telling the story of her own life, and for the first time we can really understand where she's coming from and what was happening in her life before, during and after Atlanta. The family feud, the loss of all her money, her escape from home at the age of seventeen, the freedom, the parties, the drugs and all the injuries that ultimately took their toll on her and forced her to retire prematurely. Not to mention her secret sister!
But one of the most interesting issues mentioned by her is the politics behind the US Women's Gymnastics program and how ugly and unfair it can be. I was shocked to hear about her life with the Karolyis, especially because, like many others, I believed the show they put on for the cameras! I can honestly say that I lost all the respect I had for them, and, no matter how many medals they have under their belt (and at the expense of how many gymnasts!), they will never be more than losers to me. It truly disgusted me!
But better than everything else was just discovering what an amazing, strong, beautiful (inside and out!) woman Dominique turned out to be after everything she's been through. She's been to hell and back in more ways than one, but somehow managed to stay true to herself and learn from her experiences. The last chapter brought tears to my eyes as she described the last days with her father and how they reconciled... All in all, it is a beautiful story worth of everybody's attention - gymnastics fan or not! - and I'm really proud to say I'm a fan of hers!
29 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Off Balance: A Memoir
By S. D.
A brave and honest revealing of the dramatic personal life of a gymnastic icon. While Dominique's story is most unusual and unique and quite "mind blowing", the book also has several important layers that stick in the mind long after the book has been digested. How well are our young athletes protected in training? What priority does their health and well being have? How fair is the system that selects them for team participation?
The book is easy to read. I also appreciate the robust and sophisticated presentation of chapters in the book. The format allowed two very diverse but extraordinary components to be presented as equal centerpieces in Dominique's dramatic story.
The most remarkable, amazing, and inspirational of all is how healthy and well grounded a woman Dominique has become. I salute Dominique as a loving woman, wife, mother, sister, and articulate advocate for the young gymnastic athletes of tomorrow. A fascinating read.
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