I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite

I want black mothers to be able to share their worries about pregnancy, their birth stories (be they traumatic, tragic or testimonial) and beyond, because that’s what their white female counterparts have been doing for decades and, I must add, getting paid very well for.GOOD BITS: Having grown up in the same area to Candice (she literally mentions my school in lesson 2), this book felt very relatable. I want black women to know that their version of motherhood is as righteous and as sacred as any other and deserves to be as protected as any other woman’s.

I want black women, black women who happen to be mothers, to be given space to share their multifaceted motherhood journeys irrespective of their family make-up, current financial situation or number of past lovers – with pride. I personally don’t want to reclaim the term baby mother. There are far more layers to my nonchalance towards becoming a mother, which we will unravel within the pages of this book, but as with most appropriated things, it seems that only the ones who feel strangulated by the negative stereotype at hand seem to want to do away with the respective term altogether. It’s used in a way to demean and perhaps unintentionally put a red mark through any ideas along the lines of assimilating black motherhood with positivity and success.Īnd for that reason alone, the fear of becoming a baby mother, I perhaps resisted the idea of having my own children. I am not your baby mother, I am the mother of your child!’ I remember hearing a faceless woman spit at an equally faceless man one day.Īnd now the term ‘baby mother’ isn’t just a succession of piercing words solely cast upon single black mothers, it’s become a label which is used primarily to dismantle and disable the legitimacy of black women’s version of motherhood in general. Responsibility for your own privilege, this book simply must be read. Unrepresented, or whether you’re doing what you can to take Whether you’re a black British mother who feels overlooked and Times more likely to die during childbirth than their whiteĬounterparts that children from black and ethnic minority groups areĪlmost twice as likely to be in poverty and that I Am Not Your Baby

I’ve discovered that black mothers are five This book has been crucial to my ongoing journey of understanding, as

I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite