I HAVE daughter envy.

There, I’ve said it.

It may seem downright ungrateful to wish for a daughter, after being blessed with two wonderful, healthy sons. But, try and try as I do, there are days when I look at my friends’ cute little girls and go weak inside.

There are days when I see baby girls in public, and marvel at the way they sit so daintily and obediently on their mothers’ laps, while I am struggling to rein Julian in from climbing all over the restaurant furniture.

I once met a nice middleaged woman who told me: “Your sons belong to your husband. Only your daughters belong to you.”

When I repeated this story to my cousins, who have an average of two boys each, they quickly retorted with an addendum: “Your sons belong to their wives.”

I guess the received wisdom is that daughters will always have their mothers’ welfare firmly in mind. Indeed, since I became a mother, I have grown to understand my mum – her worries and sacrifices – in a way that I doubt I could if I were a boy.

As Greek dramatist Euripedes said: “To a father growing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter.”

That’s generalising, of course. Open the newspapers on any given day, and there’ll probably be as many stories about unfilial daughters turning their mothers out of their homes as those about useless sons.

Still, the idealised image of a nurturing female makes the notion of a caring daughter extremely hard to shake.

The challenge, my head knows, is to raise my sons to be as close to me as any daughter can be. But, still, the heart yearns.

Of course, psychological factors play a part. Growing up as the elder of two girls – my brother joined us only later; he’s 11 years my junior, and eight years younger than my sister – I have always wondered what it would be like to have an older brother to stick up for me and beat up all my lousy ex-boyfriends.

What I couldn’t get back then, I have a strange desire now to create in the family I am building. How nice it would be for both Julian and Lucien to have a little sister they can dote on.

Unfortunately, the Supportive Spouse and I are stretched financially with two kids, and a third is not in our plans. Besides, it’s not a given that our next child will have XX chromosomes –my paternal grandmother had six boys, despite wanting a daughter.

Meanwhile, the grass is always greener on the other side. A few of my friends have remarked that they would be chuffed to have a son next, after their first-borns turned out to be female.

From a socio-historical point of view, that is practical: Property used to be passed down the male line; land in agricultural communities is often parcelled out to male offspring; more men in the family used to mean a greater labour pool for the farm.

I don’t think this is quite what my friends have in mind when they talk about needing a son. Still, peel away the skin of personal preferences, and often we find a tangle of cultural nerve-endings that are old but not quite dead.

In these modern times, however, it really makes no sense to have more sons than daughters. The dowry system is all but dead in Singapore. Women keep their own names after marriage.

And you don’t need 10 sons to work on your farm any more. So, I’m predicting that daughter envy is going to be a whole lot more common in time to come.

Meanwhile, I’m going to play godma and favourite aunt to all the little girls in my family and social circle. As an astute netizen said in an online forum: “Do all the fun girl things with her, and then send her home to fight with her mother.”

[email protected]

For more my paper stories click here.