"Look at it this way," one of my mother's cornier friends blabbed to her when she learned of my engagement, "You're not losing a son, you're gaining a daughter."
Big deal. My mother already had a daughter. Four of them, in fact. Yet, when it came to males, there ran but one scion from the Dillon family tree. Me. The only boy. The one who upon traipsing off to Japan was virtually ordered not to land himself a Japanese wife.
Not that my mother had anything against Japan. Or against wives.