Mom are you a robot?

By Nathan T. Baker
Dec. 7, 2008

hen I was young I asked my mom if she was a robot. She recorded this in the family diary. I remember it too.

Here’s the thing we know about memory. We never really know if we have it right. Have two family members recount the same occurrence from five years ago. It’s never the same.

Journalists, historians, and truth-tellers have the task of figuring out common threads in the stories we tell. I’d say this recounting is accurate, although I’ve given the experience some thought and my subconscious has plugged in the significance of the story.

I’ve carefully placed the missing items into my Jenga Tower of Memory so it is coherent, now a story, now something I can share.

A professor at Belmont University taught this concept as “narrative theory,” or putting B between A and C. Neil Postman is to thank for how this applies to our political minds today.

So my memory:

I was thinking of milk, maybe mother’s milk, but I’m not sure. I was imagining a kitchen and the objects in the kitchen, including perhaps pots, the oven. She was doing something with food perhaps. I was focusing on the concept of “mother.” I was frightfully confused, because I wanted to know where she came from. I was a child and there were creatures around me, namely my family. I had questions. One that rose to the surface was “Where the heck am I?” Also, “Who are you?”

I didn’t know where these people came from. I knew my mother’s love, but for a dark moment I was skeptical if her love was real or manufactured.

It was a weird thought and I feel guilt now (perhaps then), but for all I knew I was in The Matrix, Down The Rabbit Hole, Something Deeper. Movies and all story in our culture touch on how our world works and how we came to be. Think alien or superhero movies. Creation stories fascinate us. They come from us. The pursuit of these questions start early in our culture, and sometimes in a kitchen with your mother.

So with my little mind, I tried to spin up an explanation of how the world operated and I had little success. That’s when I asked my mom if she was a robot.

I remember she reassured me she wasn’t. I then thought robots would have the mechanism to easily trick young people into believing the humanity of robots, but I wanted to believe her, so I did. I believed her in the same way I believe God exists and loves me. Putting scientific and theological arguments aside, let me speak at the relational level.

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I often forget God or ponder how he could be real or close, but I can’t consider a world without his love. So, I rely on it just as I rely on my mother’s love and my family’s love. It is an anchor. I feel incredibly fortunate to have a family that has been present and loving, which of course shapes my view of God, trust, and people.

Here was my train of thought: Here is a robot or human telling me she is a human. If she is a robot, others could be robots. The world could be centered around me, because everyone could be out to get me, every little robot. I am the earth; robots orbit me. I can’t prove they think like me or are like me, so they could all not be like me. Or maybe she is telling the truth.

Trusting in my mom’s humanity led me here. As humans, we are put in This Situation, where we alone feel the senses of life. Others apparently feel it too, but we can never feel it exactly as they feel it because we are only in our body. We are forced to trust people and live in community.

I found this hard to do and still do, but I think I am learning to trust people as people, because how they explain their feelings to me is shockingly familiar. In fact, it reminds me of my own experience, and this seems enough proof we are all in the same place.

Original artwork by Nathan T. Baker