Has anyone else noticed a growing trend towards novels titled The Something-or-other’s Daughter? Apparently they have. Lists abound. Mine, a short one, includes The Astrologer’s Daughter (2014), The Botanist’s Daughter (2018) and The Clockmaker’s Daughter (2018).

According to Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, publishers may be behind these unoriginal titles. She asks a favourite bookseller who says readers buy what’s familiar. And indeed, these titles typically feature traditional jobs – no AI engineers or data scientists. The only one I’ve read is The Ringmaster’s Daughter (2001) by Jostein Gaarder, a twisted tale of unwitting incest from a male perspective. (Yawn.)

Personally, I’m tired of patriarchal narratives: these titles perpetuate the anonymity of women. And historically, ‘daughter’ carries baggage to do with being someone’s property, a chattel to be married for political and/or financial advantage.

Preferring to be identified by my profession, like the fictional parents of all these fictional females, I’ve rarely thought of myself as a daughter. A word that implies relatedness in the sense of belonging to anyone, irrespective of gender, feels loaded to me. Styled by my mother as a smaller version of herself, I sought my own identity through rebellion. By age three, I’d become ‘a real handful’ and she panicked. Diagnosed as agoraphobic, medicated on Librium, she took her doctor’s advice to find a hobby. And for the next few decades she sewed countless items of clothing, curtains, cushion covers, dachshund doorstops etc., hiding humble objects like toilet seats and boxes of tissues inside pastel padded quilting and frills.

Also covered up, I’ve since learned, was her conception out of wedlock (her parents had married just four months before her birth) and her brother’s illegitimate daughter when he was nineteen. His fiancée sued him for breach of promise and his mother, who paid the price, kept the receipt. When I discovered it I knew what it pertained to because my formerly secret cousin had told me. I’d learned about her after answering a letter from a second cousin, which I’d found among reams of overlooked mail my mother had hoarded for decades.

Anyway, culling my mother’s possessions has led me to reflect on why so much female creativity should be devoted to decorating – covering up – manmade inventions, something I never used to question. My mother encouraged me from an early age to master knitting. Then came crochet, macramé, copper enamelling, origami… But each of these hobbies soon bored me; riding a horse or even a skateboard would have been far more rewarding.

On leaving school, I explored more exciting ways to kill time than making Afghan rugs, cloche hats and toe socks while watching TV. Handicrafts existed to keep restless girls like me out of trouble, out of touch with real-world issues, safely out of sight – too sheltered to develop courage, strength or an intellect. Patience? To the extent that repetition is trance inducing, these pastimes may be a form of meditation. But the fruit of any truly spiritual practice isn’t as tangible as a beaded belt or a woollen tank top. Besides, why bother when technology was churning out blouses, trousers and knitwear much faster and more cheaply than my mother could make them by hand?

The thing was, these pursuits not only quietened her anxiety; they connected her to a local social sewing circle of women who eventually became her friends for life. One of these friends even met my illegitimate cousin’s father during a holiday in Bali – providing photos of him and his family that fill a chronological gap.

But what my mother didn’t consider, as she steered me towards domesticity, was that my peers had other interests. So I knitted, knotted and crocheted in solitude until art school offered escape. I moved out of home at the first opportunity, which on a student allowance meant a tiny room in a huge share house. Suddenly my social life and world view expanded. And the more I craved travel, the less I wanted to own things that wouldn’t fit in a backpack. What mattered were skills like improvising meals at short notice for hordes of people – resourcefulness and flexibility, not dependence on patterns. Loath to be seen in a hand-knitted scarf or beanie, I bought boho clothes from op shops, while my mother stored my cast-offs in plastic bags with mothballs.

Last month a bric-a-brac dealer came to pick through family heirlooms and rubbish (now my widowed mother’s confined to a small shared room with only one cupboard – the sort of place you can land when you abandon normal hygiene standards and neglect to answer your phone and front door). And the first dealer gave my number to a second – who turned out to be a woman I’d lived with in that huge share house. Hunting through the mess in search of retro treasures, my former housemate stumbled on a stash of child-sized crocheted clothes. As she started to laugh, I cringed with shame. But, ‘I like these!’ she said, and added them to her haul. I never let on who’d made them.

One early sign of my mother’s decline was her loss of interest in such activities. Sewing got sidelined while she nursed her dying husband, to be resumed after his death – but without conviction. And as time passed, and her depression didn’t, unfinished garments stuck full of pins piled up. She couldn’t imagine herself as other than a wife (and a mother): defined by her relationship – of necessity – to loved ones. Meanwhile her sewing circle dispersed, to aged care and beyond, leaving her alone. And finally I was left to dispose of the hundreds of out-of-date handmade tops, pants, skirts, frocks, jackets and jumpers she’d refused to sell or donate during the 14 years that much of it lay untouched in musty cupboards.

On my parents’ vintage cane bookshelf I found Catherine Gaskin’s Daughter of the House (1952) and A Daughter of the Land (1918) by Gene Stratton-Porter – ‘daughter’ has featured in book titles for a long time. But even now, where are the titles referring to men as belonging to women? (The Lap Dancer’s Son; The Checkout Chick’s Husband; The Romance Novelist’s Uncle…?) Apparently they exist. Yet one comprehensive commentary notes that males are less likely to be defined by their relationships.