(ThySistas.com) Every few months the machine cranks up again. A fresh headline, a think piece, a panel of talking heads shaking their heads about the former actress from California who married into a palace and then had the nerve to walk away from life as a working royal. Meghan has become the name folks reach for when they really mean something else entirely. Bring her up at a cookout and watch grown people get worked up over a woman not one of them has ever stood beside.
My problem is not the noise itself. It is where that noise ends up going. The venom aimed her way rarely stays put where it started. It spills. It lands on a whole category of us who recognize the script by heart, because we have lived some version of it in offices, in sanctuaries, in marriages, in families that adored us right up until we asked for something more than they were prepared to give.
Meghan drew a line. Leaving an institution far older than the country of her birth was heresy enough. Speaking on her own behalf, where the unspoken rule demanded silence and a pleasant, grateful face, pushed it past forgivable. For that act of self-possession, much of the press shifted from treating her like a fairy tale bride to casting her as a convenient villain.
Linger a while on the charge hiding under all that noise. Ungrateful. One little word carrying so much freight. It gets hurled at any sister who dares to leave a comfortable position, who divorces a provider, who resigns from the committee, who announces she will no longer host the holiday everybody just assumed she would carry until the day she died. The meaning beneath it is old and it is cruel. You were handed a seat at the table. How dare you decide the chair never actually fit.
We know this rhythm intimately. Speak firmly in a meeting and suddenly you are aggressive. Ask to be paid what the labor is worth and now you are difficult. Choose peace over proximity to power and here come the whispers that you were always a bit too much, a bit too proud, a bit too sure of yourself for your own good.
What landed on the Duchess was that old rhythm, only cranked up loud and paid for by every tabloid with a press to run. Think back to the way some of those same papers covered Catherine during that period, then look at the blades they kept sharpened for the woman with melanin in her skin. The difference was hard to miss. Graceful when they liked the face, dangerous when they did not. Sistas clocked it before the ink was even dry. Black women have been cast as the dangerous one our whole lives.
None of this is truly about a single celebrity and her grievances. It is about the cost of saying no. Refusal to shrink. Refusal to perform contentment inside a house that quietly diminished you. Refusal to stay put and stay quiet and stay small so that everyone around you can remain cozy and undisturbed.
Now let me flip the whole thing over, because marinating in grievance is not why I sat down at this keyboard.
There is a lie sold to us hard, especially once we cross into our forties and beyond. That lie says our currency is youth, and once youth fades we had best keep our heads down, tame our opinions, and act thankful anybody still glances our way. Chase the smoother face, smaller dress size, and relevance like it is sprinting away from you.
I want to preach the opposite gospel. The most interesting thing a grown Black woman can do is keep growing into herself, decade after decade, while the rest of the world waits on her to shrink. Picture the ones you truly admire at 45, at 55, at 70. There is the aunt who quit apologizing for taking up room. The teacher who finally said the honest thing at Sunday dinner, unbothered when the whole table went quiet. Somebody’s mother who left the marriage, or the pulpit, or the corner office, and built a life she picked on purpose. That is not fading. That is arriving.
These days Meghan sits inside a brand-new chapter as I write this. Late this past summer she and her husband returned across the water with their two children, dropping 7-year-old Archie and 5-year-old Lili into new schools for an extended stretch on English ground. For now, much of the couple’s attention has been on getting the children settled into school and adjusting to life back in Britain. Read that decision plainly. Their children come ahead of whatever public spectacle follows the family, and Meghan continues to move on a timetable far more her own than the one she lived under as a working royal.
Then came the answer, right on cue. Around a dozen days after the family touched down, out went word from the palace in the form of a letter reiterating that the couple remain non-working members of the Royal Family, that their HRH styles remain in abeyance, and that their charitable and commercial work is carried out in a private capacity rather than on behalf of the monarch. Sit with the timing. Two adults move their children to a new country, bother nobody, and the palace still finds it necessary to circulate paper making sure nobody is confused about where Harry and Meghan stand. The official explanation may be administrative. The symbolism is harder to ignore.
Watch how deeply all of this unsettles folks. A grown lady past forty, unbothered, financially independent, married to somebody who chose a different life with her over the family firm, protecting her children from the same lenses that have followed her for years, and still occupying prime real estate in the collective imagination. The assignment was to disappear gracefully, and she declined it outright. That refusal reads as a threat precisely because it works.
Here is what I want my sisters to carry away from every bit of this. Staying young was never the assignment. That ship sailed on all of us, and it was never the paradise the magazines swore it was. What keeps you in the room is harder work, and far less cute. You put in year after year until folks cannot dismiss you, until you know your own worth so deep it does not wobble when somebody pokes at it. Reach that place and it stops mattering what the boss thinks, or the husband, or the palace, or some stranger hammering at a keyboard in a comment section.
Black women catch hell for that kind of knowing, worse than most, and I am not about to pretend different. Set a boundary and it gets called a tantrum. Leave and you get called bitter. Speak and you get called angry. The toll is real. Yet look closely at who ends up paying it, and again and again you find the ones who eventually got free.
The former working royal is not my heroine. I do not need her to be. What she offers, for our purposes here, is a wildly public example of a private truth Sistas have passed across kitchen tables for generations. The world will always hold opinions about Black women who decline to stay in the spot assigned to them. Let it. Their discomfort was never yours to carry.
So put your energy into the woman you are still turning into, the one waiting three or ten or twenty years up the road. She will not be younger, quieter, or easier to sit beside at dinner. What she will be is more herself than she has ever managed. That is the one who stays lodged in people’s minds long after the day’s headlines rot away. Nobody has figured out how to bottle that and sell it back to you, Sistas, and nobody ever will.
Staff Writer: Brenda Poole
BP writes about entertainment, relationships, faith, and life in general… She enjoys speaking on things Black women can relate to and hopefully giving a sista something useful along the way…
Feel free to email her at BrendaP@ThySistas.com.