Jiu Jitsu tournaments were getting less and less interesting to me. Rockson’s birth forced me to look beyond Jiu Jitsu and think about what kind of family I wanted, as well as to take a harder look at the one I was born into. Helio was almost seventy when Rockson was born, and his mind-set was still straight out of the 1950s. He didn’t care if his grandsons were educated or polite, so long as they were good soldiers for his army. Helio would always acknowledge Carlos Gracie, the clan, and the universe, but he could never recognize my mother for the support that she gave him. Growing up, I felt that my mother was always sad. Sometimes I would find her crying and ask, “Mother, what’s wrong?” Even though she would always say that nothing was, I realized that she was quietly suffering. I saw how much she sacrificed for my father and her kids—and how little my dad reciprocated or even acknowledged it. Can you imagine being married to Helio Gracie?

While there were many things I liked about the Gracie traditions, polygamy was not one of them. Uncle Carlos and Helio were not the first polygamous Gracies. Their father, Gastao, had five children with another woman while he was married to my grandmother. I was about thirteen when my father asked me, “Would you like to have more brothers?” I said yes and he told me to get in the car. We drove to an apartment building in Botafogo, about ten minutes away, and took the elevator to the sixth floor. Helio knocked on one of the doors. It was cracked open, and Vera, a woman who worked at the academy, stuck her head out the top. Then one little head popped out the bottom of the crack and smiled at me, then another, and then another. “They’re all your brothers,” my dad said. That was the first time I met my brothers Rolker, Royler, and Royce. The kids were cute and friendly, but as much as I liked them, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for my mom. My father never told her that he wanted more children. He just showed up one day with four more! At first mom was depressed, but eventually Helio convinced her to become friends with Vera. Although my mother pretended to move on, I could see how much this hurt her.

Once I became a parent, I saw that my dad and Uncle Carlos were dinosaurs, that their outlook and their relationships were all static and frozen in time. This tempered my admiration for them, and I didn’t want to be that way. My wife, Kim, supported me wholeheartedly, and I recognized that without her help, I would not have made it as far as I did. I saw the sacrifices she made for me, how she was always willing to put me first and herself second. My dad would never have appreciated his wife like that; he didn’t give a fuck about how my mother felt. In Helio Gracie’s mind, his mission was bigger than these kinds of sensitivities.

That’s an excerpt from Rickson Gracie’s autobiography, Breathe, released this week.