At some point, we decided that the most life-changing relationship two people can have deserved a two-letter abbreviation. Not “parent.” Not “mother” or “father.” BM and BD. Baby mama and baby daddy. It sounds less like a role and more like a cast list for a show nobody auditioned for, and like any good show, it comes with storylines: the BM drama, the BD drama, the co-parenting beef, the group chat nobody wants to be tagged in. Two years ago, Offset typed “u my bm I won” in the middle of a public feud with Cardi B, and the line has refused to die. This month, a Substack essay called it a phrase that is “still haunting women everywhere,” TikTok is still full of videos dissecting it, and with Offset now promoting a new album, GMFU, it’s back in the conversation. I’m a 20-year-old Black woman in college, and I’m not pretending I live in a convent, so I’ll tell you the thing I think about when I hear “BM”: I’d like to be cast in literally any other show. Not because motherhood is shameful, but because of what the label does to a woman the second it’s assigned to her. It turns a whole person into a relationship status and a source of drama. I want to talk about why the shorthand exists, who it serves, and what it costs.
Language does this: we take something enormous and compress it until it fits in a caption. “Parent” is a verb. It describes what you do for the next 18 years or so. “BM” is a status, and it describes your relationship to a man’s drama. And the shorthand doesn’t stay neutral for long. “Baby mama” comes out of Black English and Jamaican Creole, and one Substack writer notes that mainstream media has long portrayed that family arrangement through Black communities in particular, whether to reflect reality, reinforce stereotypes, or both. I can admit, it’s used pretty often in my family. Which brings us to Offset. Five words, and every one of them is doing the most. During that feud, while Cardi was pregnant with their third child, he replied on X (formerly known as Twitter): “u my bm I won.” With this framing, the mother of his child is a prize, like something you’d win at the fair, except the fair is a public feud and the prize can read. The aforementioned Substack writer argued that the line “treats motherhood as a scoreboard a man can win.” You’ll notice there’s no “u my bd, I won.” Fatherhood apparently doesn’t come with a trophy. It’s the final boss of the acronym problem: a mother turned into a prize and abbreviated to two letters in the same breath.
Women have fought back the way women usually do: with jokes. Mothers started using “you’re my BM, I won” as a way of saying they were traumatized and survived anyway, which is the most efficient way I’ve seen anyone turn an insult into a coping mechanism. I get it. But even the comeback happens on the scoreboard’s turf. We’re still playing his game, we’ve just started winning it ironically.
Then there’s the flip side, which is where I live. Every woman I know has watched the cautionary tale: the TikTok genre teaching women how to spot a man who’s “trying to trap you with a baby,” complete with red flags, like a flight attendant’s safety demo for dating. In the event of a red flag, please remain calm. So, I do what a lot of women my age do, which is try to make sure I never end up on the flip side. I’m intentional about who I’m with and what I’m doing. And of course, I’m a big fan of Planned Parenthood. I’d like to be the author of my own story, not a supporting character in somebody’s caption.
But here’s the unfair part: being careful only gets you so far, and the burden of avoiding the label falls almost entirely on women. Nobody’s out here running a personal mission to avoid becoming a “BD” with the same intensity. And the fear isn’t invented. Reproductive coercion, meaning pressuring a partner to get pregnant or sabotaging birth control, is documented. A CDC study of about 9,000 women, cited by Women & Infants Hospital, found that at least 9% of adult women in the U.S. have experienced it. In a study of young women at California family planning clinics, about 1 in 5 reported pregnancy coercion. And about a third of women who reported partner violence also reported coercion or birth control sabotage. That’s abuse, and it deserves to be called abuse. It is not a test a woman fails by not being careful enough.
And while we argue over scoreboards and traps, nobody puts the real stakes in the caption. CDC data for 2024 put the maternal mortality rate for Black women at 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 14.2 for white women, Axios reported. The person carrying a pregnancy is taking on real physical risk, and for Black women that risk is more than three times higher. So yes, the dude you’re hooking up with telling you he’d get you pregnant is in fact a threat.
So, maybe the goal isn’t only avoiding the label. Maybe it’s retiring it. I don’t think mothers are a punchline, but I know how fast we turn them into one. “Mother” is already a complete word. It never needed the abbreviation. And nobody wins a pregnancy. Somebody carries it.