Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, is talking about one of her worst nightmares. It was 2019 and she was returning to her car after a speaking engagement in South Africa.
She had just arrived in the country a matter of hours earlier with her four-month-old son, Archie, and his husband, Prince Harry.
Archie was put in a housing unit with his nanny, Lauren. He was taking a nap fit for a king while his parents attended the official engagement.
It was then that Markle heard the news about the fire. She shares her experience in the debut of her podcast, “Archetypes.” It was released on Tuesday on Spotify.
“We immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga, and there was this 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,” she said during a conversation on the podcast with her friend Serena Williams.
“What? There’s been a fire in the baby’s room. What?” Meghan added.
The Duchess hurried with her team back to the residence and when they arrived, Lauren was flooded with tears. The nanny said that she planned to put Archie down for a nap, but she thought, “You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs … and her instinct was like, Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.”
It was in those few moments that the heater in the nursery caught fire. It was only discovered because someone near the nursery smelled smoke and investigated.
“Of course as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’ Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken,” she remembered. “And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement? I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Can you just tell people what happened?”
“Even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement,” she added.
Serena Williams added her own story about the trials of being a famous, working mother.
Markle’s next podcast will feature Mariah Carey.
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