Meghan Markle Reads Another Freakin' Poem to 'Archetypes' Hostages

On the latest episode of Archetypes with Meghan, the Duchess of So Much Fussess talks with Canada’s First Lady Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau (“For homies, Sophie G. in the house,” as she intros herself), Better Things’s Pamela Adlon, and SNL’s first Black lesbian writer Sam Jay. Dream bundt cake rotation!

(Meghan “Oh Gosh” Markle loves baking and hates impropriety; when her mother Doria Ragland called her unexpectedly during the record in the stu she goes, “Oh sugar, my mom is FaceTiming me,” a creative workaround for the word “shit.”)

Today, Goody Markle is deconstructing two archetypes and then smashing the binary all together. Can one person be a good mom/good wife and a bad mom/bad wife, or are we all just one thing all the time?

I’ve listened to eight episodes of Archetypes with Meghan, so I know the answer. But if you’re not as lucky as I am, Meghan’s fellow elder statesman Grégoire-Trudeau is here to help. Is she just a mom and a wife? Heavens, no! She’s a personal stylist, a really good singer, and a friend to all Markles. She first met Meghan seven years ago at the Canadian Fashion Awards, and they’ve basically been sending voice notes to one another ever since.

Grégoire-Trudeau says women need to figure out a way “A way to be free in the world, not from the world,” inspired Meghan to read a poem from A Radical Awakening by Dr. Shefali Tsabary. Another freaking poem?

Here’s an excerpt:

There comes a time in the life of a woman

When she discards her old ways

Liked tossed shoes in the garbage

When she shreds her list of shoulds and obligations

And when impossible expectations are burned in an incinerator

There comes a time in the life of a woman

When the approval of others

Once jewels

Turn to pennies in her sock

OK? Hope to get there one day.

Adlon, former child actor and showrunner and writer as well as star of Better Things, has more concrete advice for escaping the archetype of “bad mom.” Meghan and Pamela met at Gloria Steinem’s birthday at a nearby “cottage” when Meghan was “supes pregs” and have been best friends ever since, even though Adlon tells the Duchess to ask for her phone number at the end of the episode. Adlon tells Meghan that the reason she’s so good at being a boss is because she was a single mom raising three kids who only listened to her instructions begrudgingly. Adlon’s colleagues take just a little less strong-arming. It’s a good conversation.

After Jay talks how she invites male friends over to open a bunch of jars for her fiancé and her just in case they’ll need them in the future, Meghan ends with some poetry of her own:

You can be a feminist and be feminine. You can clutch your pearls one day and let your curls be wild the next. You can be a working mom in and out of the house and you can have drinks with friends after putting the baby to bed. You can be the mom who says she needs a break for just a moment and then– if you’re like me — sits in bed scrolling through pictures of — you guessed it — your kids …You can be the wife who makes pot roast or the wife who only makes one thing well: reservations.

Another archetype found dead lying in a ditch with pearls.