From insecure teen to royal TV star — she nearly died after giving birth
He also claimed that he personally picked Meghan up from school every day, or sent a car for her if he was too busy.
What really left a mark on Meghan during her childhood were the constant stares and questions whenever she and her Black mother were out in public.
A dark-skinned mom
”I just remember my mom telling me stories about taking me [to] the grocery store and a woman going, ‘Whose child is that?’ She’s like, ‘It’s my child.’ ‘No, you must be the nanny. Where’s her mom?’” Meghan said.
After her parents split up, Meghan was raised by both of them until she turned nine. After that, her father took on the primary caregiving role while her mother focused on building her career.
Meghan lived with her dad full-time until she left for college at eighteen.
Her mother moved to a predominantly Black neighborhood outside the Valley. The shift was jarring — but she found her circle in a tight-knit group of women who helped raise her.
‘We had a nice network of women who really helped me raise Meg. She was always so easy to get along with, congenial, making friends. She was a very empathic child, very mature,” Doria said in one of the episodes of Meghan’s Netflix show.
Still, their relationship wasn’t always traditional.
“I remember asking [her] did I feel like her mom,” her mother recalled, “and she told me I felt like her older, controlling sister.”
”I was not the pretty one”
For Meghan, adolescence was filled with the kind of insecurities many can relate to — except hers were sharpened by feeling like an outsider.
She used that intellect early on. At age 11, she successfully challenged a sexist TV commercial. Her writing skills, even then, were a superpower.
Despite financial struggles, small moments felt like luxury.
“I grew up on the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler,” she recalled. “I knew how hard my parents worked to afford this… and I felt lucky.” Continue reading…
