Every parent knows the repetitive fears that come with, well, being a parent. The endless streams of ‘what ifs’ that can make even the most rational thinkers worry about the impossible.
One royal parent, Meghan Markle, recently opened up about how one of her fears ended up being a hairline away from happening right here in South Africa.
Speaking on her highly anticipated podcast, Archetypes with Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex, Markle and her first guest Serena Williams, spoke frankly about being famous working parents and the trials and tribulations that come with those two worlds in the episode dubbed The Misconceptions of Ambition.
The conversation lets listeners into the world of motherhood from some of the most famous women’s perspectives, intent to unbox certain stigmas and humanise stories that often aren’t told – their own. This
led Meghan to share a time when she had to leave her child, Archie behind due to work commitments in SA – and how a situation no mother ever wants to get a phone call about came thereafter.
Archie was four and a bit at the time. “The moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in,” she began. Archie was getting ready to have a nap with his nanny Lauren looking after him.
She went on to share that she and Prince Harry had gone to an official engagement in Nyanga, Cape Town where she stood on a tree stump, giving a speech to women and girls. Shortly thereafter in the car, Meghan received a call.
“There’s been a fire at the residence.’ What? ‘There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.’ What?” she recalled the moment.
She and Prince Harry rushed back to the unit where Lauren was in a “flood of tears.”
Meghan shares that Archie was supposed to have been put down for his nap, but Lauren had wanted to get a snack downstairs.
“And Lauren’s from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down,” Meghan said of Lauren’s decision that unknowingly saved her son’s life.
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished.”
Meghan’s strong voice can be heard fraught with emotion despite the situation turning out to be incredibly fortunate. The story relays a certain type of empathy that many parents may have felt. It’s not the fact that the bad thing didn’t happen, but the feeling that it could’ve.
Meghan went on to explain that despite the situation stirring the family, they still had to continue with their appearances.
“I was like, ‘Can you just tell people what happened?’ And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”
“And part of the humanizing and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break. Because we did — we had to leave our baby. And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.”
Meghan’s podcast is available on Spotify.
ALSO SEE:
Musk’s latest tweet on motherhood sparks important conversations
Feature Image: Spotify
