One daughter please.

In many Arab countries, today, the 21^st of March, is Mother’s day. The start of spring is when millions of people salute their mothers, thanks them, and cherish them. For the Arab diaspora it is the morning where the reminder on phones and computers goes off and we pick the phone to call mothers.

Rania and I called my mom first, while she was visiting her mom, and then we called Rania’s mother who’s line was busy. When we finally managed to get hold of her, she told us she was talking to her aunt Nihaya. We both laughed, what an unusual name!

We later learned that the name is not a coincidence, Nihaya, which means ‘the end’ in Arabic was a message from her father telling God that he’s had enough girls and that it was time to give him a son. Little he knew that almost 70 years after his message was heard, the daughter would still be living with such a fatalistic name.

This reminded me of The Economist’s March 6^th issue where the cover read “Gendercide” above an empty pair of little pink ballerina shoes. They say that a vicious circle of ancient preference for sons, modern desire for smaller families, and ultrasound are making it easier to abort and neglect female babies resulting in a catastrophic skew in female/male ratios in many countries around the world, most significantly in China and India.

It also reminded me that Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese author who writes in French, has predicted this 16 years ago in “the First Century After Beatrice”, except that his vivid and accurate prophecy of what is happening today was caused by a bean sold on market stalls that guarantees a son and took humanity close to its end.

I look at my society, and see how technology evolved faster than our biology and sociology. In the Middle East, we loved very sweet tea, because it used to give cheap energy to farmers for a long day’s work. Not many are farmers, the tea is as sweet as ever.

We liked boys for generations, they grew up to defend the family, work in fields, hide loosing their virginity, and carry the family’s name. None of this matters any more, and we still hear the disturbing, yet familiar “may God give you a male”.

Whenever Rania and I talk about kids, I say, “I am having a little daughter” she invariably answers, “You mean you’d prefer a daughter” only for me to shoot back, “NO, I AM having a daughter”. I am not going to take any beans to guarantee that, I am only going to hope for a little girl; a father loving, tender, caring, not-much-into-fistfights, little girl.

If I get the daughter I want; and if I can get her to reach the world an educated, sensitive, intelligent, young lady; showing my people what their daughters can be, then I would have had a good life.

And here are your 500 words for today.