Kate Middleton’s hidden heartache behind her smiles at huge royal event

Much like the other senior royals, Princess Kate, is rarely seen out and about on official engagements with anything but a wide smile upon her face, and not a hair out of place.

Being an official representative of the monarchy comes with a myriad of benefits beyond living in a palace, with the Royal Family finding themselves regularly lucky enough to meet with extraordinary people and charitable groups, whose work is seriously impressive. However, it also comes with living inside an unenviable bright spotlight and the pressure to compartmentalize their private lives from their public selves, allowing themselves to fully embody the symbolic status of the crown itself. A royal expert has claimed that there is one particular aspect of Kate’s royal life that the Princess of Wales finds especially difficult, and causes her a lot of heartache, despite how picture-perfect and happy she consistently appears.

The expert – royal author and journalist Katie Nicholl – claimed that foreign royal tours are particularly tricky for Kate because as such a hands-on mother, she struggles to be away from her three children, Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, nine, and Prince Louis, aged six. Whilst the public would likely never suspect that Kate was struggling throughout the many royal tours she has undertaken alongside her husband Prince William, where she always seems engaged and delighted to be there, the expert claims that beneath the surface, things aren’t entirely as they seem.

“Kate wants to be modern, she wants to be hands-on, she wants to be present,” the expert said, as reported in the Daily Mail. “Despite being the Duchess of Cambridge and being able to afford around-the-clock nannies and so on, she had her mum looking after Prince George and Princess Charlotte, which struck me as just really normal. I could see how much comfort and confidence that gave her in getting on with her job, which she does brilliantly, but I think it is always such a wrench for her to leave her children behind,” Nicholl said.

The expert – who has travelled with Kate and William extensively on their royal tours – also has claimed that during the couple’s visit to Bhutan in 2016, Kate even admitted that she was finding it hard to be away from her children. In recent years, the Prince and Princess of Wales have reportedly implemented a rule to ensure that as much as possible at least one of them is at home with the children, however, they will likely have to attend engagements abroad again together at some point.