Friday, March 2, 2012

Blame

One of my very best friends was having a tough day yesterday. Another friend and I were trying to cheer her up via email.

I think it worked and all’s well on that front.

But something the friend in the bad mood wrote stuck with me.

She mentioned something about not being willing to part with all my chromosomes which resulted in a child with less than the typical 46 chromosomes. She was being silly and I was absolutely not offended.

I even went so far as to point out that in over 70% of cases where 5p- syndrome is a spontaneous deletion it is on the paternal side.

But I wonder if I’d be so flippant were this statistic reversed. If there were a greater than 70% chance that Olivia’s syndromes was my ‘fault’ would I be so quick to point it out?

Let me say right here that I absolutely do not feel there is any blame to be placed in this situation. Whether it was the egg or the sperm that carried the deletion that led to Olivia’s 5p-, it doesn’t matter.

I know that Tom, knowing the statistics, doesn’t feel one iota of guilt. And I’m glad for that. I don’t want him to feel guilt for something we don’t even know is the case. And even if it was the sperm that carried the deletion, he had no control over that.

And yet…I know that if I were told that it was 70% likely that it had been the egg that carried the deletion, I’d feel guilty. It’s just the nature of being a mother. At least it’s my nature.

Sad but true.

So we’re probably lucky the statistics are what they are. I can bask in the knowledge that it probably wasn’t my fault while not at all thinking that it is my husband’s.

I read a blog post once where a mom said that her son’s Down Syndrome was her fault. And I wondered, first, how do they know that? And second, why would a doctor tell a parent that even if they could tell for sure whose fault it was.

I have such a hard time with blame and fault. Our kids are amazing. They overcome so much and fight so hard just to do what we all do so effortlessly every single day. We love them with an intensity that scares us and yet, we can’t seem to let go of the guilt or the need to blame ourselves, to find fault in what we couldn’t have controlled anyway.

Olivia is who she is. That is just as much on me as it is on my husband. Together, we made this beautiful little girl who just happens to be missing part of her fifth chromosome. We have no way of knowing for sure who left out part of her genetic material. And in the end, it doesn’t matter. We adore her and her big sister with every cell in our bodies and that’s what counts in the end. Not placing blame and assigning fault.

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