Meghan Markle is celebrating a significant event!
On Tuesday, September 2, the Duchess of Sussex celebrated her mother, Doria Ragland’s birthday with a touching Instagram Story.
Meghan posted a video of herself beaming with joy and kissing her mother on the face. She embellished the video with pink hearts and put in white writing, “Happy Birthday to my beautiful mom!”
The footage was accompanied by Stevie Wonder’s 1980 song “Happy Birthday.”
Meghan and Ragland have a tight bond. When Meghan was younger, Ragland gave her the moniker “Flower.” The lovely moniker was revealed on Meghan’s now-defunct lifestyle site, The Tig.
Meghan described her various nicknames at the time as “Meg, MM, M&M, and Flower (which my mom has called me since I was little).”
Ragland frequently went from her native state of California to visit her daughter and son-in-law, Prince Harry, when they were still residing in the United Kingdom. She was present at several of their family’s milestone events, like the 2018 royal wedding and the birth of their son Archie in 2019.
Meghan’s longtime friend and beauty artist, Daniel Martin, told PEOPLE in 2019 that “Meghan draws a lot of strength from her mother.”
“Doria exudes refinement, style, and confidence while remaining approachable. I believe Meghan gets a lot of that from her mother,” added Martin.
Ragland opened up for the first time in Meghan and Prince Harry’s 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, admitting that “the last five years have been challenging.”
Ragland also described how Meghan informed her that she was seeing the Duke of Sussex.
“We were on the phone, and she said, ‘Mommy, I’m going out with Prince Harry,’ and I began muttering, ‘Oh my God.’ And so, from the start, it was like, ‘Oh my God, nobody can know,'” she stated in Harry & Meghan.
When Ragland first met him, he observed he was “handsome” and “really nice,” with “really great manners.”
“And they seemed quite happy together. “When it was announced that they were together, it seemed like a novelty,” she explained.