December 02, 2024
Meghan Markle’s personal thoughts on her father Thomas Markle have just come to light, and its all been shared via her now-deleted website, TheTig.
In it she recounted her identity as a mixed-race little girl and the lengths her father went to, to make sure she had a doll house that resembled who ‘she is’.
An excerpt from her blog reads, “Draw your own box. White. Black. Hispanic.Asian/Pacific Islander. Those were the only four options available for me to check as my ethnicity in my 7th grade English class. Choose one.”
“It was some sort of mandatory census that had to be completed before an exam, and there I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do. Not knowing which box I fit in to,” Markle recalled.
But once she came home and shared the moment with him, “my dad said words that will stay with me forever: ‘Draw your own box’.”
She later added, “This is the same man who took apart two Barbie boxed sets (because you could only buy a white Barbie family or a black one), and made a custom one to bring home to me- his specialty set included a black Barbie mom, a white Ken doll dad, and two kids - one black and one white.”
“I picture him standing there in Toys R Us, moms glaring at him for taking the toys apart, perhaps an employee saying ‘excuse me sir, you can't do that’ - as my dad carefully separated the boxed sets to make one that echoed my reality.”
“One that showed me that I should (and could) make my own box,” she also went as far as to say.
While ending her note, which was originally created for Fathers Day 2014, Meghan said, “The blood, sweat and tears this man (who came from so little in a small town of Pennsylvania, where Christmas stockings were filled with oranges, and dinners were potatoes and spam) invested in my future so that I could grow up to have so much.”