Off Balance: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

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 outsidervanished. 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