Nina Keneally has 40 children. More and more are on the way.
The 64-year-old professional mother offers the Brooklyn-based service “Need a Mom,” selling her surplus mothering skills to millennial New Yorkers in need of some motherly treatment.
“Many of my clients are far away from home or simply do not have good relationships with their mothers,” says Keneally.
Women in particular often find themselves searching for someone to lend an ear in this hectic metropolis. But the surrogate mum is quick to stress: “I’m not a professional counsellor.”
Herself a (biological) mother of two grown sons, Keneally listens to her client’s problems just as any real-life mother would.
“When you need a mum, just not YOUR mum” is where Keneally sees the market gap. In her view, parents often make one big mistake when it comes to their grown-up offspring: “Too often parents or grown-ups try to give people advice who are not receptive to it.”
After a 30-year career as a commercial theatre producer on and off Broadway, Keneally decided to get a certification in drug and alcohol abuse counselling. Afterwards she worked in a methadone clinic for eight years.
“I think I have a kind of boots-on-the-ground understanding of what it’s like to live in this city,” she says. Her clients mainly work as creative professionals or are employed in New York’s nightlife. “I sometimes think it’s hard for parents who haven’t lived here to understand what it’s like to live here.”
Sometimes problems in the mother-daughter relationship are buried far deeper. For instance, one of her gay clients has a mother living in the more conservative south of the US and has different ideals.
“Her mother can’t even understand her lifestyle, or doesn’t want to. It’s beyond her belief system,” Keneally explains.
Time with Keneally costs US$40 per hour and clients decide how they spend the time.
One of the clients is Christine, a 36-year-old bartender who regularly meets for coffee with her rented mum. “She’s the same age as my mother,” says Christine, who got in touch with Keneally when her father passed away.
“I really had to talk to someone”, Christine says. “I couldn’t talk to my mom.” Her biological mother didn’t take the news of a surrogate personally. “She’s fine with it,” Christine says.
Before the 36-year-old reached out to Keneally, she was seeing several professional therapists because she was suffering from depression. But after these sessions, she often felt worse than before.
Things are different with her surrogate mother. “She remembers everything I say. And she’s hip,” Christine says with a laugh.
So what do experts make of replacing a biological mother with another one? It’s not the worst approach, says family therapist Bjoern Enno Hermans from the German Society for Systemic and Family Therapy (DGSF).
“If bonding with the birth mother didn’t work out that well, a relationship with another person can turn out to be more beautiful or healthy,” says Hermans.
He himself often has sessions with mothers who are mentally not well off and therefore lack the resilience needed to cope with the problems of their children.
For some people seeing a person with more life experience can be better than seeing a professional therapist. “And of course a therapist won’t hug a client,” Hermans says.
But a rented mum will never be able to fulfil everything a child wants from their parents. Only her real sons get to call her “mum,” Keneally says. – dpa
