Meghan Markle put her best foot forward when she was pregnant.
So much so, that the Duchess of Sussex, 43, was always dressed to the nines from head to toe while pregnant with Archie, 6, in 2019.
“A friend just said to me the other day, they were like, ‘I just saw this picture I’d forgotten about when you were so pregnant with Archie,’” Markle said on Tuesday’s episode of her “Confessions of a Female Founder” podcast.
At the time, the “Suits” alum was a working royal and made public appearances all the way up to giving birth to her first child with Prince Harry.
While pregnant with Archie — and their daughter Lilibet, now 3 — she “gained 65 pounds.”
“I always wear my five-inch, pointy-toed stilettos,” Markle confessed.
She recalled her pal telling her: “‘You have the most enormous bump and your tiny little ankles are bracing themselves in these high heels.’”
“But all my weight was in the front,” she continued. “So you’re just going, how on Earth am I not just tipping, you know, face planting? I was clinging very closely to my husband, like, ‘Please don’t let me fall.’”
After giving birth to Archie, Markle and Prince Harry stepped away from their royal duties in 2020 and moved to Montecito, Calif. In 2021, the couple welcomed Lilibet.
During her second pregnancy, the “With Love, Meghan” star stayed largely out of the spotlight.
On last week’s podcast episode, Markle got candid on how motherhood wasn’t exactly how she “envisioned” it.
She explained that while she “always wanted” to have kids, there had been “a lot of external things happening” during both of her pregnancies.
“I will say, for myself — especially when they are baby babies and before I was [a] mom… I’ve always wanted to be a mom,” Markle said, noting it was important for her to show her kids what being a “working mom” looked like.
“I was like ‘Oh gosh, I’m going to give a speech with a baby on my hip,’” she recalled. “I had a whole vision — you fast-forward, granted I had a lot of external things happening by the time I had both pregnancies and both babies.”
The As Ever founder confessed, “It was not the way I envisioned it.”
Through it all, Markle has had her other half to lean on. The pair, who tied the knot in 2018, have remained a united front since relocating from England to the US.
Looking back on their romance, Markle reminisced on affectionately using “M” and “H” to talk about one another at the start of their relationship.
“Probably at the beginning of us dating, when everything was in code,” she admitted while on “The Jamie Kern Lima Show” in April. “People didn’t know we were dating for, talk about memory lane, so long ago. I mean, it’ll be our seven-year wedding anniversary soon. I couldn’t tell anyone who I was dating, and who was keeping [the secret], so I think we were just on a letter basis.”
As Markle described, “it stuck.”
“I love nicknames,” she added.
“He’s just out there, just constant, like he’s just going to do whatever he can to make sure that our family is safe and protected and we’re uplifted and still make time for date nights,” she gushed. “He’s also a fox. If you haven’t noticed, my husband’s very, very handsome. But his heart is even more beautiful.”
She reflected, “You have to imagine at the beginning, everyone has, like, butterflies. Then we immediately went into the trenches together. Yeah, right out of the gate, like six months into dating.”
“So now, seven years later, when you have a little bit of breathing space, you can just enjoy each other in a new way, and that’s why I feel like it’s more of a honeymoon period for us now.”