Before the royal titles, world headlines, and millions of fans, she was just a little girl warming up microwave dinners and wondering where exactly she fit in.
Born to a Black mother and a white father in Los Angeles, this girl didn’t grow up feeling like a Hollywood story in the making. In fact, she often felt like she didn’t belong anywhere — not in school cliques, not in beauty standards, not even in strangers’ assumptions about her own family.
“My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half Black and half white,” she once shared.
But it’s all part of her story that’s shaped everything — from the way she saw herself to the strength she had to find when the world finally did start watching.
Raised on TV dinners and tough questions
As a child, Meghan Markle described herself as a “latchkey kid,” coming home to an empty house while her parents worked long hours. Her mom, Doria Ragland, made a living as a makeup artist and her dad, Thomas Markle Sr, worked in television.
“I grew up with a lot of fast food and also a lot of TV tray dinners,” she said.
“Watching ‘Jeopardy!’ and having a lot of microwaveable kids’ meals… that was normal.”
However, there seems to be some disagreement about what Meghan’s childhood was really like. Her father has challenged his daughter’s account, saying her memories — especially about how she ate as a child — don’t match his own version of events.
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
Meghan shared that many people assumed she was a white woman, which led some to question how she could have a dark-skinned mom, who once recalled being mistaken for the nanny in public.
”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.
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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.
“I was a big nerd growing up,” she confessed. “People don’t understand that about me. Like, I was not the pretty one. My identity was wrapped up in being the smart one.”
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.”
”And as a Girl Scout, when my troop would go to dinner for a big celebration, it was back to that same salad bar or The Old Spaghetti Factory – because that’s what those families could afford.”
Things changed when her dad won $750,000 in the lottery. Her half-brother said it helped put Meghan on the path she’d later walk with such fierce focus.
“That money allowed [her] to go to the best schools and get the best training,” he said. “[She] doesn’t stop until she gets what she wants.”
Early hustle, Hollywood dreams
Even as a kid, Meghan dreamed big. At 11, she wrote a letter to her principal promising to make their school famous once she made it.
She wasn’t kidding. By 13, she was working jobs from babysitting to slinging donuts at a stand called Little Orbit. Her work ethic never stopped.
Meanwhile, she found love for acting while hanging out on the set of Married… with Children, where her dad worked as a lighting director.
“A really funny and perverse place for a little girl in a Catholic school uniform to grow up,” she laughed.
But teenage Meghan was still figuring out who she was.
”I wasn’t black enough”
“My teens were even worse — grappling with how to fit in,” she wrote in a blog post years later. “Being biracial, I fell somewhere in between.”
She also faced challenges early in her acting career, partly because she was seen as “ethnically ambiguous.” As she put it, “I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones.”
By her twenties, the pressure to look and act perfect took its toll.
“It was a constant battle with myself… to be as cool/as hip/as smart/as ‘whatever’ as everyone else.”
At 33, though, things shifted.
“I am 33 years old today. And I am happy,” she wrote. “To figure out how to be kind to yourself… to feel [happiness] — it takes time.”
From Suits to St. George’s chapel
That little girl who felt invisible would grow up to become Rachel Zane on Suits, and eventually — Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
She met Prince Harry in 2016. Two years later, they married at Windsor Castle. By 2021, they had two children: Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
But life as a royal mom wasn’t without terrifying challenges.
A postpartum nightmare
In April 2025, Meghan launched her podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder. In her first episode, she revealed something few had known: a life-threatening health scare after giving birth.
“We both had very similar experiences — though we didn’t know each other at the time — with postpartum,” she told Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd. “We both had preeclampsia. Postpartum preeclampsia. It’s so rare and so scary.”
“In the quiet, you’re still trying to show up for people — mostly for your children — but those things are huge medical scares.”
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Whitney agreed: “I mean life or death, truly.”
Meghan survived. But not long after, she suffered another private heartbreak — a miscarriage, which she later shared in an emotional essay.