But did anybody do something really wrong to make your child have
DMD? I only see two possible situations.
Either you did know that there was a risk of DMD because it runs in
the mother's family, and you consciously decided to take that
risk. If you knowingly take a gamble, you have to live with the
consequences of your decision. You may regret that decision, you
may learn from it, but you need not feel guilty, because you
did not intentionally cause your child to miss a gene.
The other possibility is that you did not know there was a risk,
or did not realize it. That will happen in at least the one third of
the cases where the mother had a spontaneous mutation.
There is no particular thing you can do to avoid having a change in
your Xp21 gene.
It can also happen because nobody made you understand that
there was a risk. Can you be blamed for doing something you did
not realize could be risky? I don't think so.
Even so, as a mother you may find you blame yourself for not
having a "perfect" child. I have only anecdotal evidence, but it
seems that the divorce rate among parents with children with
DMD is a lot higher than among the general population. You may
not even realize it, and still keep your partner at a "safe" distance:
don't come close to me, because I make flawed children!
Well, guess what. No child is perfect. You will be doing just as well
in raising your child as any other mother. If not better.
Fathers may also unknowingly blame their wives for "causing"
their son's DMD and so destroying their own expectations of their
child. When you think about it, you know that that is hogwash, too. The father contributes half of the genetic material himself. If he had just picked a sperm cell with an X chromosome in it, the baby would have been fine.
There are about 200 lethal genes in our genetic pool, and it is only by good fortune, not by anybody's special valor or lack of it, that those genes rarely show up. Anybody can have children with genetic defects, it's the luck of the draw, is all. Neither you nor your partner deserves blame for that.
If you realize you are taking in guilt or dishing it out, you can try and get rid of it, the way you get rid of a poison. You and your partner need one another even more than before, because you have a special child to take care of. And the shared responsibility can even make you grow closer.
