Borrow my mum!

There's this project for which I have tons of arguments, all of them excellent. A project that I would like to see realised. A project discussed with friends and they all liked it. A project I'd like to expose here and elsewhere with flamboyant verve.

But really it is quite simple: it's time to pair up the groaning places with the healing places. The idea: the kids who never had a chance get to spend some time in the now deserted quarters of the twentysomethings who have moved on with their life, leaving their parents with a bad case of empty-nest syndrome. In short, you can borrow my mum!

I mean this, and I've done it. I've plugged kids with my mum and her partner by simply asking them to take them in. They could live in my former room, dabble in my books, play my guitars, stroke my cat, love my friends, go to my school, hear my preacher, learn to ride horses... you get the picture. And by the time they meet, the hosts have become experts at nurturing young people anyway, so they're not beginners either.

Another family of empty-nesters welcomed Rob, one of my best friend, when he was 16 and war broke out in Rwanda. You should see the love that developed between them. My mum misses my crazy borderline friends, she now loves them in a very real sense, and they love her too. It was the best time of her last five years, in the evenings she was looking forward to coming home to the sempiternal spaghetti they would cook. Rob and his German family share the most inspiring love relationship. This works and it is that easy!

You know, I love mainstream folks. During the Second World War an entire village became heroes because someone had encouraged them. Someone let them believe that they could be just that. That's the greatest gift you can give anyone: to see the flame in them and to passionately believe in it. And when I see my contemporaries on a Saturday afternoon, buying crap pseudo-spirituality books in their desperate search for God. I love them so much I could scream.