As most moms who work outside of the home already know, the balancing act between your career and your family can often feel absolutely impossible. Though many aspects of Meghan Markle’s life are very different from the typical mom’s, there’s one thing she has experienced firsthand that many parents will be able to relate to: Being a working mom is hard.
During this week’s edition of Confessions of a Female Founder – the second episode of Meghan’s new podcast – she chatted with Reshma Saujani, a fellow mom and the founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First.
Their conversation turned to the topic of being a mom, which Meghan said is her “favorite title.”
“I love being a mom so much. It’s my favorite thing,” she said. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.
As much as she loves kids Archie and Lili, the stress of being a working mom means she often finds herself needing a break.
“It is the thing where you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just need a break. I just need a minute.’ And the second you step into the other room, you go, oh, but let me scroll through pictures of them endlessly on my phone, and … my husband’s like, ‘My love, can you just give yourself a minute? Why don’t you go work out? Why don’t you go take a bath?” she said on the podcast.
It’s like those tough days when you’re counting down the minutes to bedtime – you’re so ready to have silence, but the second you have it, you can’t stop talking about how cute your kids are. Plenty of moms know what that’s like!
“It’s the parenting paradigm where it is so full-on and I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Meghan said, calling the experience of being a mom who works from home, surrounded by her kids, “incredibly overwhelming.”
Later in the podcast, Meghan said that because both of her kids were sick when it was recorded, things felt extra challenging.
“With that comes the woman who is juggling it all and doing it all from home, being confident enough to tell the truth about what’s going on – because you can’t give grace to someone in the same way if you just have no sense of it,” she said. “My kids, for example, right now, one has RSV, the other has influenza A. I hear a little pitter patter of feet upstairs, home from school, you know, cough syrup all night and rubbing the back and … we still find a way to show up for both.”
