I Am Not Your Baby Mother Candice Brathwaite

It’s about time we made motherhood more diverse…

When Candice fell pregnant and stepped into the motherhood playing field, she found her experience bore little resemblance to the glossy magazine photos of women in horizontal stripe tops and the pinned discussions on mumsnet about what pushchair to buy. Leafing through the piles of prenatal paraphernalia, she found herself wondering: “Where are all the black mothers?”.

Candice started blogging about motherhood in 2016 after making the simple but powerful observation that the way motherhood is portrayed in the British media is wholly unrepresentative of our society at large.

The result is this thought-provoking, urgent and inspirational guide to life as a black mother. It explores the various stages in between pregnancy and waving your child off at the gates of primary school, while facing hurdles such as white privilege, racial micro-aggression and unconscious bias at every point. Candice does so with her trademark sense of humour and refreshing straight-talking, and the result is a call-to-arms that will allow mums like her to take control, scrapping the parenting rulebook to mother their own way.

Review: Blogger Candice Brathwaite is known for her beautifully constructed and refreshingly straight-talking Instagram captions, so we can’t wait to read her urgent part-memoir, part-manifesto about black motherhood * Red magazine *
This book is about so much more than paid partnerships and a square-by-square existence. It is an energetic decimation of the narrow, middle-class white lens through which we culturally speak about motherhood; a humorous and sensitive navigation of the nuances within race (Candice, as a black British woman and her husband, as a Nigerian man); and a searing commentary, through the motif of a Bugaboo pushchair, on how class and race intersect. I gobbled it in one weekend and encourage everyone – mother, or otherwise – to do the same. * Pandora Sykes *
Written in her brilliantly witty manner, this book is every black British woman’s motherhood manual * Refinery 29 *
Humorous but unflinching, every mother, everywhere, should read this book * OK Magazine *
She’s the straight-talking social-media star who hates the word ‘influencer’, refuses to ‘dress small’ and is on a mission to portray a vision of motherhood inclusive of race and class * Stella Magazine *
Searing * Dolly Alderton *
Remarkable * Lorraine Kelly *
One of 2020’s must-reads for all mums, new or experienced * Culture Whisper *
An observant and timely guide * Evening Standard *
A powerful challenge to narrow mainstream depictions of motherhood … this is a book that will undoubtedly change the way we talk about motherhood in the UK * Lighthouse Books *

Author Biography: Candice Brathwaite is the hugely popular influencer and founder of Make Motherhood Diverse – an online initiative that aims to encourage a more accurately representative and diverse depiction of motherhood in the media. She has worked with brands such as Pampers, Ella’s Kitchen and Specsavers, and has appeared on countless panels to discuss modern motherhood. Her writing has appeared in Stylist, the Metro and the Huffington Post. I Am Not Your Baby Mother is her first book.