Meghan Markle says Archie’s nursery caught fire during South African tour: 'He was supposed to be sleeping in there'
Meghan Markle recalled a traumatizing incident with her first born Archie in the debut episode of her podcast, Archetypes.
The episode included a conversation with Markle's friend Serena Williams, where the two talked about the double standards facing women in society and the unfair expectations placed on them as mothers. The Duchess of Sussex even opened up about a time when her son's nursery caught on fire while she and Prince Harry were visiting Africa in 2019.
"When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie. Archie was what, four and a half months old? And the moment we landed we had to drop him off at this housing unit they had had us staying in. He was gonna get ready to go down for his nap, we immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga and there's this moment where I'm 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.'"
Markle recalled responding with shock as someone provided more information. "There's been a fire in the baby's room," she was told. She had yet to return to the residence to see if Archie was safe. Luckily, the baby's "amazing nanny" who was in "floods of tears" hadn't let him out of her sight.
"She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap and she'd just said, 'You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.' Lauren's 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,'" Markle explained. "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."
Markle, now a mother of two, went on to explain that everyone had been "shaken" and in tears at the time. Even still, she and Harry had to go to another official engagement.
"I said, 'This doesn't make any sense. 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 breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we're put into is having some understanding of the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break," she said. "Because we did, we had to leave our baby. And even though we were being moved into another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go and do another official engagement."
Markle had been prompted to share the experience after Williams revealed a difficult motherhood moment of her own that she faced just prior to a match at the French Open in 2018. While she made headlines for wearing a black catsuit that day, she was dealing with something more pertinent in her personal life from the night prior.
"I had Olympia and I had a match the next day and that night, she fell out of her high chair and broke her wrist. And she was on my watch and I was just basically devastated. Like I literally couldn't think. I felt so guilty," Williams recalled. "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 until like four in the morning. Meanwhile I was, of course, this was the one day I was playing early. I remember holding her the whole night and just like rocking her to sleep and I just didn't let her out of my sight at that point."
Williams explained that she's already "hard on myself" as a mother and "a little bit of a perfectionist." The incident had only exacerbated those feelings.
"I was so mad at myself for even allowing that to happen. So I think I got like 30 minutes of sleep and then I had to go play this match and I'm just thinking, 'How am I gonna play?'" she continued. "I somehow managed to win but I was so emotionally spent and just so emotionally drained that it was crazy. And then like every night after that I was just with her the whole time and I’m like, 'You’re gonna be with me,' and I just took a lot on."
Markle praised Williams for her ability to continue to show up, although the athlete said she would "drop anything at any time to whatever I had to do for Olympia. Middle of a Grand Slam final I would leave if I had to."
According to Williams's recent retirement announcement, the 40-year-old has decided to not put herself in a situation to make that kind of decision.
"I do like the word evolution because I don't like the word retirement. I don't like it for me in this scenario because I will never retire from something that you absolutely love. I'll always have some sort of involvement in it," Williams clarified of her decision to walk away from competing in the sport. "It won't be professionally but I will always want to be involved in some way, shape or form in tennis. Obviously I'm retiring professionally but it's also an evolution. I'm doing more business things and I really wanna expand my family. And you know I've been putting it off for so long and as a woman, there's only so long you can put that off."
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