New York: When you're a young adult and your mother is no longer with you – maybe she passed away, maybe she's back in your faraway home town – you might find certain kinds of interactions are missing from your life.
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Thoughtful career advice over a cup of tea, company while you watch that old movie, someone to talk to about your love life who's been through it all before.
In New York City, a place you can get anything delivered at any time, you can now hire a mum too, for all those interactions you feel you might be missing out on.
For $US40 ($56) an hour, Nina Keneally, a mother of two grown children herself, now in her early 60s, will spend time with young clients doing whatever motherly activities they might feel they need. It's like Uber, but for a mum.
The service, called 'Need a Mom', came about organically for Keneally, who recently moved to the ever-so-hipster Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick teeming with university students and young professionals, and found herself a sought-after source of advice from young people she met at yoga class, in the park walking her dog or volunteering at her community arts organisation.
"Because I was often the oldest person in the room, quite frankly, after a period of time, people got comfortable with me and started coming up to me if there was a problem or something going on in their life," says Keneally, who has warm, affable but a no-nonsense manner.
"Just to someone who is a friendly face, and just a little more ... shopworn than their friends."
For some clients who do have their own mums, she offers a perk: this is "mothering" without the judgment, or the reciprocal demand for attention that a real parent, naturally, expects from their child.
"Sometimes there was frustration when they called their mothers, their mothers didn't quite understand what it was like to be young and living in New York City these days, and their mothers tend to – I'm sure I do this to my kids – go off track sometimes, you know."
Instead, with Keneally, the interactions are all about the client. That's prompted some derision about generation Y's sense of entitlement, with The Daily Beast suggesting she was providing a service for "needy millennials".
But Keneally, an open-minded sort, who'd variously worked in theatre, government and as drug rehabilitation counsellor, takes a kinder view.
"Everybody asks me 'is it because this is such an entitled generation out here?', and I don't think that's the issue.
"Most of them are very hard-working, smart, ambitious and really just a little frazzled around the edges ... I know what it's like to come from a small town and come to the big city and to have a dream and try to pursue it, and what that takes out of you."
Keneally's motto in life is "good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment" and she says she doesn't necessarily tell people what to do, but asks the right type of questions so they can make good decisions for themselves.
She's been in business for only a few weeks, but so far her clients include a young woman who wants her to come to sit on her bed and chat while she cleans out her wardrobe, or another who wants her to come over so they can sit and mend clothes together.
"One of the most charming requests I've had was a young man out of town who, I think he had lost his mother ... he would just like to have a correspondence with somebody who's like a mother – a real correspondence, with letters and envelopes and stamps.
"How could you say no to that?"
Since news of her business started spreading online, she's had inquiries from other women her age about whether they might be suited to started a similar business. It's a model that would seem as relevant in London, Sydney, or any other other city, especially where there is a high volume of anxious young people far from home.
Keneally's advice to other would-be mothers for hire is kind but tough.
She strongly believes that her clinical counselling experience and some of the techniques she learnt – like asking open-ended questions or using cognitive behaviour therapy techniques – make her suitable for this service.
"Not to be pejorative but ... you need some professional qualifications besides 'I raised three good kids' ... I don't think alone that's necessarily enough."
