Life can be amazing. It can also be a complete and utter mind blow. The story of Dominique Moceanu and her secret sister qualifies under both.
Alice Gomstyn of ABC News reports on a crazy story that saw two sisters, one a famous Olympian and the other an acrobat born without legs, brought together after decades apart.
The report picks up on a portion of Dominique Moceanu’s memoir Off Balance. In it, Moceanu recounts how she came to know her sister Jen Bricker, a 24-year-old who was given up for adoption shortly after birth.
Bricker was born without legs and grew to admire gymnastics and one of the biggest stars in that specific sport.
Her idol was the diminutive US gymnast Dominique Moceanu, a young woman she would later find out was actually her sister.
Armed with the knowledge that her hero was actually blood, she got to writing a letter that would convince Moceanu that she indeed had a sister she never knew of.
The NY Daily News has the letter, a snippet of which follows.
I realize this must be a lot for you to take in right now, I mean, it is a lot for me too, but I’ve had a lot of years to soak it all in. I’ve been trying ever since I was sixteen (I’m now twenty) to think of the right way to get in contact with you. I thought about it almost every day.
Kathleen Miles of The Huffington Post offers what came next in what would be a budding new sisterhood.
Moceanu confronted her parents who recounted that Bricker had been born shortly after Dominique’s sixth birthday.
According to her mother Camelia, she wanted to keep Jen but was convinced by Dominique’s father that the family couldn’t possibly afford the medical bills.
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.
Dominique and her parents have had their tribulations and once served to have Dominique legally emancipate herself from the two.
While that relationship may have been strained over the years, the one between Moceanu and Bricker continues to grow.
Bricker continues to beam with her fortunate life. She claims her parents never once made her feel handicapped and she has made a life for herself as a professional acrobat and aerialist. She tells ABC the following.
It’s so much fun every time the three of us get together. And I can’t believe this crazy life is my crazy life. And by crazy, I mean awesome!
That pretty much brings us up to speed on a story that is too far-fetched to be believed and much too outrageous to be real.
