The first episode of Meghan Markle’s long-awaited podcast Archetypes has finally been released and the Duchess of Sussex was joined by tennis legend Serena Williams to talk about all things work and motherhood.
While Serena was speaking about balancing life as a working mum, Meghan told a terrifying story about an incident that occurred in South Africa involving a fire in her son Archie’s room.
The 41-year-old revealed, that she, Prince Harry and Archie, who was four and a half months old at the time, had just landed in South Africa when the tot had to be dropped off at a housing unit where the family would be staying during their tour, so Meghan and Harry could rush off to an official engagement straight away.
“There was a moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, ‘There’s been a fire at the residence’. What? ‘There’s been a fire in the baby’s room’. What?”.
Meghan went on to tell Serena, “I can’t believe we haven’t talked about this”.
Continuing with the story, the mum-of-two revealed that the she and Harry raced back to their accommodation to find their nanny, Lauren, who Meghan described as 'amazing', 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 and get a snack downstairs’. And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on 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”.
“He was supposed to be sleeping in there”, she went on to say as Serena repeated, “Oh my God”, in shock.
"We came back and of course as a mother you go ‘Oh my God, what just…’. Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken, and what did we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement”.
“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 humanising 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”.
As Meghan finished her worrying story, Williams replied, “I couldn’t have done that, I would’ve said ‘Uh-uh’”, before the Duchess gave a subtle laugh and added, “Yeah well”, before changing the topic back to Serena stepping away from tennis to spend time with her family.
