The Duchess of Sussex and Serena Williams share gut-wrenching stories about motherhood on the new podcast, 'Archetypes With Meghan.'
Meghan Markle is opening up about one of her most humanizing motherhood moments while on a royal tour with Prince Harry in 2019.
In the premiere episode of her new podcast, Archetypes With Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex discusses the concept of ambition as it applies to women in a raw and wide-ranging conversation with her longtime friend, Serena Williams. The pair engages in a dialogue about what it means to be a parent and a professional, sharing gut-wrenching stories about the times that those two roles seemed to be at odds.
"When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie," Meghan, 41, recalled. "Archie was what, four and a half months old. And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had us staying in."
While Archie was left with his nanny to have a nap, Meghan and Prince Harry immediately embarked on an official engagement in Nyanga, where Meghan would deliver a speech to a group of women and girls.
"We finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, 'There's been a fire at the residence,'" she said. ''What? 'There's been a fire in the baby's room.' What?!"
The new parents raced back to find their "amazing nanny," Lauren, "in floods of tears."
"She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, 'You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.' And she was 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.' 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 said. "He was supposed to be sleeping in there."
While the family was "in tears" and "shaken," Meghan says that she and Prince Harry were forced to continue on with their scheduled engagements.
"I said, 'This doesn't make any sense.' 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," she said. "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."
She continued, "And even though we were being moved into another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement."
Serena, hearing the story for the first time, was horrified. "I couldn't have done that. I would have said, 'Uh-uh,' " she declared.
The tennis legend also shared her own story of mom guilt with daughter Olympia at the 2018 French Open.
"I had a match the next day and that night, she fell out of her high chair and broke her wrist when she was on my watch, and I was basically devastated," Serena said. "I literally couldn't think. I felt so guilty. So she fell, we went to the hospital and she had a small tear or break in her wrist so she had to get a cast. And we didn't get back 'til, like, four in the morning."
Serena was slated to play an early match that day, but still didn't sleep. "I remember holding her the whole night and just, like, rocking her to sleep," she said. "I didn't let her out of my sight at that point."
While she managed to score a win on the court that day, the victory was bittersweet.
"I was so emotionally spent and just so emotionally drained that it was crazy," she said. "And then every night after that I was just with her the whole time like, 'You're going to be with me.' I just took a lot on. But moms do a lot."
"I would drop anything at any time to do whatever I had to do for Olympia," she concluded. "Middle of a Grand Slam final, I would leave if I had to."
Meghan said in a voiceover, "These human moments behind the scenes, the ones under the surface… they're everything. Because when we don't swim in the shallow end, and instead choose to dive into the deep end, that's when we gain a more nuanced understanding of each other."
In the debut season of Meghan's Archetypes, available exclusively on Spotify, listeners will hear from women across generations who conquered tropes in their lives to inspire a new generation. Next week's installment will feature an interview with Mariah Carey.
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