Murderbot, Mensah, and Maternal Relationships

Two people said they'd read this if I wrote it and that was more than enough to convince me so let's talk about Murderbot's relationship with Mensah. (Also planning to do these at least on ART, Ratthi, and Amena, along with personal headcanons on Gurathin. I can't get Murderbot out of my head.)

I often, not really as a joke, refer to Mensah as Murderbot's "mom." Murderbot, of course, refers to her as its "favorite human" at the end of All Systems Red, while explaining why it left. I think it would be absolutely baffled by the idea of a familial relationship with any human, and it's not like Mensah raised it or anything. But I stand by my assessment that Mensah's relationship with Murderbot is that of a mother figure to an adult child. My reasoning:

First, when she was planning to bring Murderbot to Preservation initially, Mensah was focused on the educational opportunities it would have. It is a very maternal view, in my opinion, to focus on how your child can better itself through education. I come from a family of teachers, and it's certainly the reaction of my mother or my aunts toward their children to encourage education and learning opportunities.

Second, the moment in All Systems Red when Mensah tells Murderbot "I hope you're all right" and Murderbot replies "Because you need me" and in its own internal monologue classifies this reaction as sounding like "a whiny human baby." As it points out, there is no "emotional contract" between them, but it does have the reaction of looking to Mensah as someone it wants an emotional connection with. It also suggests, to me, that Mensah's value and opinion of Murderbot has value for it, and potentially even influences its own self-worth.

Third, another brief moment earlier on, the infamous moment when Mensah asks Murderbot if it would like to stay in the crew area. She follows the offer with "Would you like that?" which to me reads as a very parental way of asking. This may be my own biases creeping in, but then, this whole thing is my thoughts and opinions so my biases are obviously driving it.

My last piece of "evidence" is ART. ART also views and treats Mensah in a manner consistent with "maternal figure to its best friend/possible life partner." When Mensah is about to come aboard ART at the end of Network Effect, it goes into a cleaning frenzy that makes me laugh every time I read it. It is in full "My most important person's mom is coming to visit everything must be PERFECT" mode.

So there it is. Why I maintain that Mensah is Murderbot's mom, even if she "adopted" it when it was an "adult." And this relationship shapes so much of what Murderbot says and does throughout the books, in increasingly complex ways based on increasingly deep emotions. At the start of All Systems Red, she's a client, and Murderbot's reaction extends only as far as "hiding the awful damage to its body so she doesn't freak out." By the time of Exit Strategy, it's killing several humans and SecUnits and would happily burn GrayCris to the ground with everyone inside it to save her. And when it's so wound up by all the events of Exit Strategy and the previous books, Mensah is the one who's capable of getting it to stand down from further murderous intent. By the time of the flashbacks we get in Network Effect, it's gone a step farther than killing for her: Now it AVOIDS killing the assassins' handler because it doesn't want to face her in a world where she has that impression of it. And the tangled mess of emotional threads finally culminates in what's very close to an actual confession of emotional attachment when Murderbot says at the end of Network Effect, "I don't want to not see you again."