For all of the extraordinary relationships I have been blessed with in my life. For all the people who have loved me, supported me, shown up for me, and carried me when I couldn't carry myself, there are a very small number of people I wish had never entered my life.

Greg is one of them.

And that is a complicated thing to say, because Greg is the father of my children, and I would never, ever wish away the three greatest gifts of my life.

But I can love my children with every cell in my body and still tell the truth about what their father brought into my life.

For years, my relationship with Greg, and everything that has followed it, has been a source of enormous stress, fear, pain, harassment, and emotional violence. There are stories from that marriage and its aftermath that I have kept largely private. Some because they were humiliating. Some because I was protecting my children. Some because I was simply trying to survive them and move forward.

But this is the story of how I became brave. And I don't think I can tell that story honestly without telling this part of it, too.

I don't know what years of living under chronic stress do to a person's body. I don't know whether any of it has anything whatsoever to do with the leukemia I am fighting today. But lying in a hospital bed with cancer has made me think differently about the things we allow to consume our lives, and about how much of mine has been consumed by a person I desperately wanted to leave in my past.

Even now, he isn't in my past.

He has not seen his children in nine months because the his visitation is contingent upon his sobriety and not using drugs, but he refuses to follow the order for sobriety testing and so he chooses not to see his kids. And yet the conflict has continued. The calls. The accusations. The police. The constant disruptions. Even on the first day I received chemotherapy, I found myself dealing with law enforcement coming to my home and calling me multiple times because of allegations he had made.

There is something profoundly clarifying about receiving chemotherapy while simultaneously explaining your custody order to a police officer.

At some point, you realize: this cannot continue to own pieces of my life.

So Greg is going to appear in this story. Not because I want to give him more space in my life, but because you cannot understand some of the battles that shaped me without understanding him.

And because Becoming Brave isn't only a story about leukemia.

It's about everything that taught me how to fight before I ever knew I would have to fight for my life.

There is much more to the story of Greg than I am prepared to tell here. Someday, I will.

For now, there is one thing I need to put into writing because facing cancer has forced me to think about things no mother should have to think about.

If I die, my greatest fear is what happens to my children after I am gone.

I want there to be absolutely no ambiguity about this: it would be among my last wishes that my children never be placed in Greg's care. And I do not believe they should ever be forced to have a relationship or communication with him that they do not want.

Those aren't words I write casually. They come after years of experiences that I haven't fully written about yet, and after learning things following our separation that I didn't even know when I filed for divorce.

There are stories involving alcohol. Arrests I didn't know about. Things that happened during our marriage that were deliberately kept from me. There are doctors who tried to help our children and subsequently found themselves threatened with professional complaints. There are medical practices we can no longer return to after confrontations. There is an entire history that deserves to be told carefully, with documentation and in the right place.

For now, I need the people who love me, and especially the people who love my children, to know something very important:

If there ever comes a day when I cannot speak for Graham, Etta and Keeler, I want the people who can speak to remember exactly what their mother said while she still could.

Protect them.

Listen to them.

Believe them when they tell you what they want and don't want.