The first episode of Archetypes – the long-awaited podcast by Meghan Markle just dropped on Spotify and there is a lot to unpack from the 50-minute episode.
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The debut episode saw Meghan and long-time friend Serena Williams speak candidly about the struggles of living in the public eye, motherhood and the double standard women face when they are labelled “ambitious.”
During the podcast, Meghan recounted a terrifying ordeal she, Harry and Archie experienced during a trip to Africa, slamming the Royal protocols for forcing her to attend an official engagement just hours later.
Meghan explained how a tour to South Africa quickly turned into every parent’s worst nightmare when Archie’s nursery caught on fire.
Archie – who was four-and-a-half months at the time, was with his nanny at a housing unit while Harry and Meghan attended a royal engagement.
“We finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say there’s been a fire at the residence,” recalls Meghan.
“There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.”
After racing back to the residence, Meghan meets her “amazing nanny, Lauren…in floods of tears.”
Lauren was supposed to put Archie down for his nap but at the last minute, she decided to bring him downstairs with her.
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs. The heater in the nursery caught on fire,” Meghan explained.
Revealing that there was “no smoke detector,” Meghan told a shocked Serena that the only reason they found the fire was that “someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway.”
“He was supposed to be sleeping in there,” an emotional Meghan shared.
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After recounting the terrifying experience, Meghan also made a thinly veiled swipe at the Royal family and their strict protocols, which saw her leave Archie and return to their itinerary begrudgingly.
“As a mother, you go, Oh, my God, what? Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement?” Meghan explained to listeners, before adding that she told those around her at the time that “this doesn’t make any sense.”
A shocked Serena agreed, asking how Meghan could not bring Archie with her after the ordeal.
Meghan explained that she had asked those around her to “just tell people what happened,” but admitted that “the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”
“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,” Meghan told Serena.
“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.
A surprised Serena told Meghan that she couldn’t have left her child, stating that “I couldn’t have done that.”
“Oh. Well.” Meghan replied.
