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Meghan Markle recalls moment she learned Archie's nursery had caught fire

She shared the 2019 incident in the debut episode of her podcast, "Archetypes," released Tuesday on Spotify.

It was business as usual for Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in 2019 as she was headed back to the car after finishing a speaking engagement in South Africa.

The former Meghan Markle had just arrived to the country hours earlier with her then-4-month-old son, Archie, and her husband, Prince Harry. Archie was placed in a housing unit with his nanny, Lauren, so he could take a nap while his parents attended an official engagement.

After the engagement ended, Meghan experienced a scary moment as a new mother. She shared the story in the debut episode of her podcast, “Archetypes,” released 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.

Meghan said she and her team bolted back to the residence.

When they arrived, Meghan said Lauren was 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 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."

Meghan said the fire was only discovered because someone near the nursery smelled smoke and investigated where it was coming from.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex Visit South Africa
Meghan, Harry and Archie during their tour of South Africa in 2019.Toby Melville / Getty Images

Meghan said as shaken up as she and everyone else was, she "still had to leave him and go do another official speaking engagement."

“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?'

"Optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels. 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."

"Even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement," she added.

Williams shared a story of her own on the podcast about the challenges of being a working mom and feeling guilty when some things slip through the cracks. She recalled a moment from 2018 when her daughter, Olympia, fell out of a high chair and broke her wrist the night before Williams had a French Open match.

"I was just basically devastated. Like, I literally couldn't think. I felt so guilty," Williams said.

Williams said they went to the hospital and Olympia ended up with a cast. They got back home around four in the morning.

Williams had an early match a few hours later, she said, and only ended up sleeping 30 minutes because she spent the night taking care of Olympia.

"How am I going to play?" she recalled wondering. Williams said she "somehow" won the match.

"When you went and played that match the next morning, no one knew what your night had been like the night before. They forgot that human piece of it," Meghan said.

Meghan's podcast will feature Mariah Carey next week.