In Meghan Markle’s recent Instagram post celebrating her daughter Lilibet’s 4th birthday, she and Harry are in a delivery suite at the hospital where – presumably – Lilibet was later born, dancing to Starrkeisha’s ‘The Baby Momma Dance’ song. In the caption Markle explains that, a week over her due date and having exhausted all the other options to induce labour, she and her husband decided it was time to dance.
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The video has prompted the usual frothing-at-the-mouth from the right-wing press, who’ve accused Meghan of ‘twerking’ (weird – she wasn’t) and Harry of, well, dancing robotically – and who’ve chastised the couple for allowing the world into this private moment.
It’s such a dour, joyless response to what is, at heart, a sweet home video. And it seems to fundamentally miss the point. A child’s birthday is never just their day (though of course that’s not something I ever thought about before having my own) it’s also the anniversary of the day you gave birth – an experience that is ecstatic, terrifying, and profoundly physical. Of course, you might look back at those final moments before it all began and reflect on the person you were, and the threshold you were about to cross.
I’m broadly ambivalent towards the Royals, and I’ve always found the reaction to Meghan and Harry from certain corners of the British media establishment strange. What, exactly, is the issue? Royalty is the ultimate gilded cage – yes, they’re born into immense wealth and privilege, but they’re also hounded wherever they go, expected to suppress all traces of individuality, and toe a line that was drawn centuries ago. In that context, it makes perfect sense to me that someone might want to break free, to reclaim a sense of personal agency, to live a life shaped by choice rather than obligation.
“It’s intimate, silly and deeply human.”
That’s not to say that I’m a Sussex stan and I haven’t always been a fan of their ‘post-Megxit’ output – I found them a little remote and unrelatable in their Netflix documentary, for instance. But then, why wouldn’t I? Their reality is unique, their problems impossibly rarefied so of course they’re remote and unrelatable.
This video, though, has a kind of joyful universality. A heavily pregnant woman dancing in a hospital room, trying to coax her baby into the world – it’s intimate, silly and deeply human.
It’s worth considering too that we live in a society that often seeks to downplay the dangers of giving birth, portraying it as a ‘natural’ and ‘everyday’ experience – a role mothers are ‘meant’ to fulfil, and therefore not deemed worthy of fanfare. This narrative glosses over the brutal truth that childbirth can be traumatic, even life-threatening, and its aftermath can stay with you long after the balloons have deflated and well wishers have gone home.
Torn muscles, nerve damage, fractured tailbones, pelvic floor injuries – these are not outliers, they are part of the spectrum of ‘normal’ birth. I don’t say this to scare anyone, but as a reminder that childbirth isn’t just the act of bringing life into the world, it’s about being pushed to the very edge of human endurance.
Motherhood is so often obscured by pastel cliches and Instagram-filtered sentimentality but behind the babygrows and milestone cards is something far more radical. It’s surviving the kind of physical trauma you might expect from a high-speed collision and then walking out of the hospital 12 hours later, with a baby. It’s wild and brutal and completely magnificent.
‘We so rarely hear about positive birth experiences because they’re not necessarily newsworthy’
And so I guess when I saw this video, that’s what I thought of – a woman looking back at the moments before she crossed the rubicon and became something else entirely.
When I was pregnant I developed an obsession with BirthTok – it’s a whole seam of content devoted to birth stories, from first contraction to the euphoric moment where mother and child finally come face to face. Gruesome, gripping, more compelling than a Marvel film – we so rarely hear about positive birth experiences because they’re not necessarily newsworthy but I guess that’s what I was looking for, in all those hours of scrolling, a sign that it would all be okay.
Seeing Meghan and Harry enjoying themselves in that hospital room, seeing Meghan posting about it as a joyous moment all these years later – it would have soothed my anxious soul in those months leading up to my own birth. Maybe we’ll see more of this candid content coming from the Sussexes. You know what, I’m here for it.
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