When We Stop Trying to Do It All with Domino Kirke-Badgley

Introduction and Welcome

Britta Bushnell: hello, folks, and welcome to Transformed by Birth, a podcast about the rite of passage of pregnancy, birth, and new parenthood. I'm your host, Britta Bushnell, author, mythologist, childbirth educator, and an all-around deep diver with a side of goofball. I'm so glad you're here today. You get to be a fly on the wall of a conversation between two passionate birth professionals who have thoughts about what's happening in birth, so grab your comfy beverage of choice or take us along for a walk as we connect with birth doula, birth doula mentor, and founder of Carriage House Birth, Domino Kirk Bagley.

Candle Lighting: Finding a Kindred Colleague

Britta Bushnell: Before we begin, we start the way we always do by lighting a candle. If you want to join me, please do, or just take a breath as I light mine. Today's candle is in honor of the power of finding a colleague or friend you connect with deeply, even if across the country.

[Editor's note: technical interruption — match issue]

Britta Bushnell: Oops, Chris, you're gonna have to cut that because my match snapped. Oops, and another one did too. There we go. Some connections just click. You meet someone, and it's like you've known them forever. You can go deep, be raw, vulnerable, skip the small talk, and dive right into what matters. That's how it is for me with today's guest, Domino Kirk Bagley. Did I say your last name right? Oh, Badgley,

Domino Kirk Badgley: like Badger.

Britta Bushnell: Badgley.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: I'm gonna say it again.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: that's how it is for my guest today. For me, with my guest today, Domino Kirk Badgley.

Meet Domino Kirk Badgley: Founder of Carriage House Birth

Britta Bushnell: We live on opposite side of the country. We've only actually met in person a couple of times. She's in Brooklyn. I'm in Los Angeles. But the second we see each other, or text, and our text threads can be long, folks. If we get into a groove, we really enjoy loving to talk, connect about all things birth and birth work. I deeply respect Domino, and having that kind of connection has been valuable for me. It reminds me that community isn't just important for families in the perinatal period; it's essential for those of us doing this work too. I often say that I want this podcast to feel like you're getting to overhear the conversations that birth professionals have with one another, the deeper, raw, sometimes complicated aspects of this field that don't usually make it to the public conversation, and I know that you sometimes want the inside scoop. So Domino and I have exactly those kinds of conversations. So I'm really excited to share this one with you. So who is Domino? Domino is the founder of Carriage House Birth, a doula collective in Brooklyn that's become one of the most respected birth organizations in New York and perhaps the country. She became a doula after a challenging birth with her first child left her aware of a huge gap in care, and she set out to become the person she had needed. After training with DONA, she immersed herself in birth work, eventually co-founding Carriage House Birth in 2012 as a scrappy collective that's now grown to over 50 doulas. Right now Domino is living both sides of this work. She has twin babies, folks, so she's in her own postpartum period while also holding space for others as co-founder of this organization, and she also has two older children, one that is a teenager, and then also these two babies. So she's got all of this happening. So there is wisdom both from the personal as well as the professional, and I'm so excited to get to connect with somebody I value and respect and trust. So, Domino, welcome! Thank you for joining me.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Thank you so much for inviting me. It feels — I mean, even having like headphones on and a microphone, I'm like — I just — I'm excited to hang out with you. I'm excited to

Britta Bushnell: hang out with you too. We could be in a coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Domino Kirk Badgley: I prefer that, but yes, I

Britta Bushnell: know it would. It would be nice. I would love that. And I'll be back in New York at some point in the near future. Okay, so I kind of feel like we got to start with — how are you, and what is happening in your world right now? It's a lot.

Twins, Teenagers, and the Beginner's Mind of Parenthood

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah, I mean, it's so much. Like people ask, like, "Well, it must be crazy to have a 17-year-old and eight-month-old twins and a five-year-old. How are you doing it all?" And my response has just been like, I have — I'm just doing it because I have to do it. I don't have a choice. And when I take a bird's-eye view of my life right now, I'm like, wow, I really am just doing it. There's no opportunity to stop. I mean, with all parenthood, right? You don't — you become a parent, and you get a little bit of a beat after you give birth, where you go, "Wow, I remember my life before." But when you have so many children, you're just like, "This is who I am now," and you have that grief and that longing for what was privately, you know, and it's fleeting, and I think right now I'm so immersed in, you know, 17-year-old hormones and brain and just the world that he's entering as he gets ready to leave our home, and I'm holding these babies, and I've never been a twin parent, and my business partner at Carriage House has two sets of twins, so I've been surrounded by twins and twin parenting for the past six, seven years. But you

Britta Bushnell: haven't been one yourself. No, it's a different — that can be a different thing.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Exactly. And I sort of pride myself on being like a seasoned-ish birth worker and a seasoned-ish parent with an older teen, and I'm humbled because I'm right back — I'm at the beginning, but with two babies. So there's this beginner's-mind energy in my life. I call my twin mom friends because I don't know everything, and I had a lot of confidence and a lot of ego with my five-year-old because I'd done it before, and I've served hundreds of families as a doula, and I don't need anyone. And then the universe was like, "Oh, you don't need anyone? Cool, you can have a baby during lockdown." And then I had a five-year-old, and then I had a baby during lockdown with no community, no one around to come over and hold the baby, and I had a 10-year-old that was really struggling with this new brother, so I just think, yeah, parenthood to me is like the deepest initiation that a person can go through.

Every Child a New Initiation

Britta Bushnell: Each time, and you're being reminded that it's each time, not just the first time. You don't get to just cross that threshold.

Domino Kirk Badgley: No, and I swear, I think as doulas we witness that, right? When we're there for the second, third, maybe fourth child. I've been someone's doula up to five babies. It's rare, but it has happened. But watching someone go from one to two or one to three, seeing the layers peel off them, and being like, "Wow! Who you were with that baby — that was the big initiation" — and then it does just keep going. You just get your ego patterns and ways of thinking handed to you. It's crazy. Yeah,

Britta Bushnell: handed to you uniquely, and sometimes — you know, I tend to like to be a meaning maker. I want something to make sense to my brain, and I look at what I learned through the birth of my second, and how radically different it was than the birth of my first, and ways in which I needed to know those things.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah, yeah, and you don't know what you don't know, right? And as birth workers, we know that. We meet people, and they're like, "I know I'm going to need this, and I know I'm going to need that, and I'm going to be this kind of parent," and we sit there kind of like — because we know they have to go through the fire, they have to walk through — and here we are, holding that, and it's going to look different for everyone from one to two to three to four to however many babies. And I do feel like there's a humility, and also just a way of being — as the mom I was to two children versus the mom I am to four. I used to not call on community. I would preach it. I would say, "Hey, call your — who are your people? Do they know what you want and need? Do you have the meal train?" And I would really preach that, but I wouldn't practice it. And then I had my second, and I was like, "Oh, there's no one around," which was the extreme. And then I had these guys, and it's like, I can't do it alone.

Learning to Ask for Help

Britta Bushnell: No,

Domino Kirk Badgley: I literally can't. The universe, God, whatever you believe in, I was handed spontaneous twins, because I've tried for so long to parent solo, even married, because I still have a brain that's like, if I don't do it, no one will, and it's really harmed me as a parent. So these twins have given me the biggest gift. They're like, oh, actually, you can't. I'm calling my neighbors down the street who have 20-year-old twins, and I'm like, "Hey, can you come over and hold one? I need to take a shower. The other one I can bring and put in a bouncer in the bathroom, but I need you to hold the other one." I barely know them, and they're like, "Sure. Are you kidding? Oh my god, I'd love

Britta Bushnell: to.

Domino Kirk Badgley: And you're like, "Oh, but

Britta Bushnell: what an initiation for you to actually do the act of asking,

Domino Kirk Badgley: yeah, which was so deeply uncomfortable. So deeply uncomfortable. I'd much prefer to just figure out how to do this alone, so that my ego can go, "Wow, you did that by yourself. You carried the stroller down the stoop, and you wore your baby."

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, look, look at you on your shoulder. Look at you. Look at what you can do, because there is a confronting vulnerability about asking for help.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Oh God, yeah, and I do find a lot of birth professionals struggle with the same thing. They live very closely to these narratives that they are the only ones that can do it, and the way they operate their businesses and the way they approach the job is from that place. And I can say that with a lot of confidence because I've lived it and I'm still living it. And parenthood and the way I operate in my family system is exactly the same way I act in my work. And for a long time, I operated very much as a solo — I was a superhero, right? I just

The Superhero Doula and the Cost of Solo Parenting

Britta Bushnell: put

Domino Kirk Badgley: on my cape and I went out into the world, and it served me. It gave me the pat on the back. The ego self was just like, "Oh yeah, wow, look at you, you're a single mom" — I was a single parent for five years, and you just served all these strangers and you made money and you paid the rent and like, whoa —

Britta Bushnell: look at you!

Domino Kirk Badgley: You go! And that really was — I lived off of that, that was fuel for so many years. It really was. I was high on my own supply for a long time, and I see it in the community.

Britta Bushnell: I think that happens, and it's curious, but I think that is part of who is often drawn to work in birth too — these archetypal caretakers or caregivers. I know that I'm in my own process of unpacking my own needs. I'm now at a different phase — I'm in the empty nest phase of parenthood, where so much of my identity over, you know, 25 years was based on what I was doing with my children, how I was organizing my household, my family, and my business and my clients, which is also a kind of caregiver, and then getting to a point where I was like, "Oh, wait a minute, what do I want? What do I need?" — even as much as the simple question of, I'll ask my children or my husband, "What do you want for dinner?" before checking in — like, what do I want for dinner? And then the unpacking of, "Oh, I have needs, I need help,"

Personal Growth Work: Birth Work as a Mirror

Domino Kirk Badgley: I think it's an unnatural thing for many doulas I know personally to take the beat and go, does this work for me? We teach that in Carriage House's trainings. We have a super holistic, extensive, foundational birth doula training where we really do a lot of role play and really teach people how to feel into the room and feel into the potential client, because they are so hungry for work, so excited to be doulas, so excited to turn on that switch and be like, "I'm the superhero running around attending births," with no one to scratch my back, and how they get off on that. I've spoken to so many doulas during training, but then in little pockets outside of the trainings, where I'm like, "How are you? Are you remembering that when you meet these strangers, it is a two-way interview, that you aren't everyone's flavor and they aren't yours?" And that's all right — we get a ton of doulas who are just chomping at the bit to go to a birth, and I was like, "There's no birth that's worth you dropping your values and your morals." And there are so many who are just like, "I didn't — there were bells that went off, and there were red flags, but I did it anyway," and guaranteed that's a thing in their lives, right? Whether it's a romantic partner or a job they had prior to becoming a doula — but just ignoring the red flags is something that I feel like we really try at Carriage House to help the doulas become aware of in their body, like what feels right when you meet someone in their home or somewhere in the middle. Maybe not always. I love

Britta Bushnell: that. I think you're tapping on something that feels really important to me, which is that birth work is personal growth work, and it feels different than work that I've done that's going to an office or things where there's just so much activation, nervous system activation, old story activation. There's a lot of archetypal energy that can show up and be like, "Have you taken care of this lately?" That gives us a real opportunity to check in with ourselves.

Domino Kirk Badgley: It holds — yeah, it holds up the mirror. It's relational. You can't get away with anything when you're a birth doula. You can't be in that space, which is so thresholdy, and just call it a job, because you're gonna have your ass handed to you. I've said this any time I've been interviewed — the biggest gift that this job gave me — I rarely call it a job, but it changed my bullshit barometer, like

Domino Kirk Badgley (cont.): yeah, and it also stopped me from — I couldn't pull the wool over my eyes anymore, because these people, perfect strangers who were giving me money to be there on the biggest day of their life, I literally couldn't perform that or fake that. It's such an intense gift to be invited into that space, and I say that in the least woo-woo way. It's like — no, you're inviting me to be at the threshold of life and death and the biggest identity-crisis reset. And you're asking me to be there with you. I joke sometimes because the work is so personal, so intimate, and historically it would have been family members, right? We would live in —

Britta Bushnell: aunties and mothers and

Domino Kirk Badgley: siblings and your own parents holding that with you. Of course, life and death — that's how we deal with those. We gather. And I think now we're paying people to be there because we are so isolated from one another. We're so separated. And then forget it — postpartum, because of this distance between each other, the mental health issues and the relational problems that we have. Asking for help, preparing prenatally — the way that people think, they're like, "Oh, once the baby gets here, then we'll figure it out, and maybe my mom will come" — not thinking about how your mom will interact with you postpartum, not thinking deeper. It's incredible, the amount of people I've met, and I'm sure you've met, that you try to hold them postpartum, prenatally, try to warn them and show them and share your experiences, and they still have to go through the fire themselves. They do.

Britta Bushnell: They have to go through the fire themselves. And one of my mentors would always say, "You don't have the ears to hear the words until you grow them." Grow the ears through the fire, through that experience. And so that statement of "no one ever told me" — I mean this with tenderness, not with crassness — there's an element of it that's the point. You can't actually hear it.

Domino Kirk Badgley: It's funny because I've had people hire me and fire me before birth just because they suddenly realize, "Oh wait, I want my partner to be there," or "my mom's going to come, she wasn't going to come and now she is, we don't need the support" — and then call when they're in labor and be like, "Actually, this is wild, can you come over?" "I'm sorry, I already — I know you, we're done with the contract, I told you I didn't want to work with you." This has happened many times over my career, where people have sworn that their partner or their family member would be enough. And the truth is, it's too much for a doula often.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah,

Domino Kirk Badgley: you know, like I wish we could have more people in the hospital delivery room. I wish I could have another doula with me all the time. Working in partnership, sure — I recommend it highly all the time when I'm teaching.

Britta Bushnell: Yes,

Domino Kirk Badgley: and then I'm like, wait, working in partnership is just level one. I want a doula with me. Who's holding me?

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, I often say that about partners and dads, because even as they're learning how to be there and show up and support and do beautiful connection with their beloved, who's going to be going through labor, I'll often remind them that they also have an experience they're going through, and who's holding them? Because there's a lot of messaging — speaking of the messaging of that individualized "go it yourself" kind of messaging that I think is rampant in this country — I talk about it in my book — the ideal of, if you can do it by yourself, you should. That independence — well, it's even with

Domino Kirk Badgley: our babies too, isn't it?

Britta Bushnell: Yes. Oh, yes. Like,

Domino Kirk Badgley: they do it across the board — put them in the room, close the door, make sure they can deal with formula instead of the breast, because you don't need to be doing that, they can handle it on their own. Partners can handle it on their own. Families can handle it on their own. It's just — it is so wild to have gone through a twin pregnancy and then a twin postpartum, and I'm still deeply postpartum with them, because two babies means — my friend was saying, because you're postpartum with twins, eight months is actually four months —

Britta Bushnell: I bet, we're halving it — double, you got to double

Domino Kirk Badgley: it, I know, she's like, "You're only four months postpartum." I'm like, "What are you talking —" oh, right, yeah, it's true. It really helps, but I just feel like doulas are filling in the gap, and it's still not enough. We're still the only ones who trust the process enough and have all this wisdom, and we're still perfect strangers, and we still need to get paid. This is so flawed, you know — how we reach each other, how families are finding — the education is so crucial, and yet there's still so much wrong with the way people relate to the idea of a doula, and the idea that they need something they can't give their own spouse, or their mother can't give. It's still so touching. It's so touchy.

Two-Way Interviews: Doulas, Boundaries, and Red Flags

Britta Bushnell: It is, and I have a tenderness for that too, because of course we want some of that idealized magic of believing that we have people in our lives who will do that for us. We long for that. We long for that village.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Like

Britta Bushnell: long there.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Stay there, and now let's add and let's keep going, right? Like the layers of the cake. My five-year-old the other day was like, "Mom, I want a 13-layer chocolate cake." It was very funny, and we were just talking about cake, and I was like, "13 is really a lot, Boone." And he was like, "No, no, it's what I want. That's the size I want." I was like, "Okay." Of course, we didn't find it, but it made me think of layers, and I'm always thinking of the layers of support in a community. And when people are like, "I have my mom, who's gonna hold my first kid while I give birth to my second, and then we have no one" — and I've worked a lot with teen mothers in my career. I've worked with people who are single parents by choice, going it alone from scratch. And it's really wild to see how the belief system around what they deserve — because we're gonna go right to the heart of this — it's a self-worth issue. It really is, because I can name that, because sure, the universe was like, "Oh, lockdown baby — that is kind of how you want to do this? Fine, let's see how it goes." And then with these guys, I'm just like, I can't have enough support. I can't have enough people come over. And what it's shown me about how I am in my community — a lot of people know me as someone who just gets it done. So people aren't calling. Why? Because I gave them that script a long time ago — I said, "Hey, I'm a single mom through and through, I don't need anything." And then I've got loads of friends who are still just like me, and not everyone's calling. People are like, "Oh, it's Domino, she's got it." And I wrote that and handed it to them a long time ago. And for me, I've had to rewrite it and give them a new script. Like, guys, I don't have it,

From Village to Isolation: Why We Pay Strangers to Be There

Britta Bushnell: Oh, I hope every new and expectant parent right now who's listening to this is hearing you.

Domino Kirk Badgley: I mean, please, I want to speak much louder into this microphone, because even as I say it, right, I'm hearing myself say it over and over again, and I've got a part of my brain that goes, "I should be able to do this alone." And I think every person I've ever supported — I've supported hundreds of people — I still feel like it's a rarity when I meet someone who says, "I don't, and I know I don't, and I'm going to prepare for not having it." And I can see it in my head — the families that surround their children when they're giving birth. Culturally, society — we don't do it in this society. We don't do it in this country. The families I've worked with where the food is made, and grandparents, if they're there, are ready for action — there's no other way, they would never think not to be there. And with the majority of the people I work with, there's a pep talk that has to happen postpartum, where I'm like, "What are you feeling you deserve right now? And why is that person driving your bus?" The "should" — take the "should" out, and then what happens? The "should" is, "I should be able to do this, it's just one baby."

Britta Bushnell: Yeah,

Domino Kirk Badgley: my mom, other

Britta Bushnell: than saying I actually deserve support, and where is the support?

Domino Kirk Badgley: Right, and I had a girlfriend recently, a good friend, a fellow doula who was in my life for many years, less so recently because she's in a different place, not doing birth work anymore. But I called her — she's graduating from school, she went back to school to become a social worker, and her graduation was coming up, and I said, "Oh my god, I want to come, of course I'm going to come to your graduation, are you kidding, amazing, so excited," and she was like, "Oh, I just assumed you wouldn't be able to come." And so this is the flip side of the assumptions that people make about the way people will be if you ask for help. That's the first one, and then who people are postpartum — "Oh, they're so busy and so underslept, there's no way they can be there for me." And it made me realize how many assumptions of being are flying around a new family or a new parent. The assumption that they've got it because they haven't heard from them, or the assumption that they won't be able to show up, so the friendship dies, or the relationship fades or becomes weaker. And I'm sitting here going, some of my closest people aren't calling me, and it's not because they don't love me. It's because they assume I'm too busy for a guest, and so here I am with twins, and 5 o'clock rolls around, and my day ends, and I'm putting three kids under five to bed, and I haven't seen a soul all day. And yes, it could be me on my phone, making sure I have lunch with this one and doing all the planning and the scheduling, but when my friend said, "I assumed you wouldn't come to my graduation," a light bulb went off, because I was like, this is it, this is the assumption that she's made out of love, because she thinks I'm slammed by babies, and I am, and then I won't do this huge thing for her, showing up for her four-year journey into social work. It just made me realize how often people in the postpartum space are misunderstanding each other and assuming.

Britta Bushnell: Those assumptions — what I'm struck with by what you're saying is a lot of those assumptions lead to loneliness.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yes, and resentment, like, "Guess she didn't come to my graduation, you didn't ask, you assumed I wouldn't be able to go." I understand why. And then also for me as a parent postpartum, I'm assuming that my closest people don't want to help me. I have a part of my brain, the younger part of my brain, that's like, "I'm alone." This was born out of something — it's probably very early, early childhood stuff. We know that all those binary ways of thinking — "I have friends, I don't have friends, they love me, they don't love me" — all of that is young.

Britta Bushnell: Yes, we're in elementary school with those thoughts. Yes,

Domino Kirk Badgley: like younger. Absolutely,

Domino Kirk Badgley (cont.): got it. So thank God I know how to track when I am being very, very binary with my thoughts and the way I am relationally. It's super helpful. But postpartum, when I make up stories that people aren't available to hang out with me or see me, or want to meet my babies, it's very damaging for me, and then I believe the narratives, and I'm making up stories about these people, and they're not signing off on it — they haven't told me what's going on with them. And I think postpartum families are really at risk of making narratives up and stories up that are ultimately very harmful long term. You come out of the woods — we're postpartum forever, we know that — but you come out of the woods of your immediate postpartum phase, and those relationships are still there, but you're like, "Oh, you didn't show up for me postpartum, you didn't come over, you didn't drop off food," you've got a whole thing spinning. And then it flips, and vice versa — it becomes the family or the people who want to leave you alone because you must be so tired and so busy, and you're like, "Well, where were you? You didn't even call." So I have a handful of people who just come over with food. They don't even call. They're literally knocking on my door, and I'm so moved. And these people know who they are. Maybe they do send a text and say, "I've got sandwiches from that place, I'm coming over," and I might say it's not a great time, but I've never turned anyone away.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, it's making me think of when I had my first. I was deeply immersed in a yoga community. I was a yoga teacher, I was a morning yoga practitioner — I went to yoga the day I went into labor with my firstborn. My husband and I met at a yoga studio, so our relationship was held by this community. We were kind of all yoga all the time at that era of our lives, and we were also one of the only ones who were having kids, and so this whole community that we thought we were deeply integrated into — and we were — but they didn't know how to show up. They didn't know how to hold us. I remember bringing my firstborn to the yoga studio to kind of meet people, but it was more of a curiosity.

Layers of Community and the Search for Kinship

Domino Kirk Badgley: I relate to it. I was 25, pregnant with my first, and no one else was having kids yet. So it was just like, "Whoa, what is this thing?" And I didn't expect to be held, because that was a real thing — I was like, I know my community doesn't know how. I don't have a lot of elders around me. I don't have a lot of children in my life. This is my initiation. This is it. I'm going to have to ask. I didn't know how.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, I didn't know how either. And I found myself very lonely in that early postpartum period, hungry for something specific, like I was looking for people who had kids, and that wasn't what my friend group had. They didn't have that, and so I went looking for people who I may not have had as much values synergy with as I did with the people where we had our spiritual practice and our physical practice all wrapped up into some of the same language. I went looking for, "You got a kid, you got a kid, who's got a kid," and that was the qualifier — whether or not they were going to be my friends.

Domino Kirk Badgley: I have found with first babies that sometimes it's such a grief period for people in terms of their identity that they often don't look for more people who have children — they start casting their minds back to who they were, so they double down on work. It's interesting, the first baby, because it's the first pancake. It's a silly thing to say, but it's that first pancake, and you're like, "Whoa, I don't know about this one, I'm not sure who I am here, I don't really know if it tastes good." Your brain changes when you have more than one child, it just does — I can vouch for that, and there is evidence of that. But I will say, the first baby, in terms of creating community, like you're saying, Britta, I was looking for people with children. I feel like there are those people who go, "Oh my god, I'm not going to survive this without other people with kids," and then there are those who are actively like, "I'm so overwhelmed by this transition and this initiation that it's too much, I want to go back," and they —

Domino Kirk Badgley (cont.): they really — maybe they find a caregiver for their kid and again double down on work. They're not always with their child. They're really avoiding going through the fire. And I do see that — because I didn't look for community, I was really missing who I was in my 20s. I wanted the spontaneity back, I wanted the creativity back, I wanted the freedom back. But I also really love my child, and both can exist. That both can exist, and both

Britta Bushnell: can — and we can long for community and mourn who we were and want it back, all at the same time. Part of what I think is so true in that postpartum experience is messiness.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Well, my mentor Geraldine Brownstein says, the definition of an adult is holding the polarities. I can feel the fear and the pain of losing this identity and becoming this other person, and I can be wildly in love with my child and my partner and my new life, and I can hold both. That's the job of the adult. And so many people go through childbirth and become parents, and they're so activated by it because they haven't done deeper work around their childhoods. Maybe they were drinking a lot, had a crazy job that required them to travel a lot — whatever they've done, they've numbed, that room in their house is locked. They have a baby and they go, "Huh, I think I have to open it, but I don't know how." And the witnessing — I hear when you were sharing about your yoga community, I was thinking of the word witness. My mentor speaks about this so much — parents need witnessing all the time to be good parents. So when you're alone, one on one with your kid, like single parents — I was a single parent, and I remember how much I dreaded solo time with him, because I wasn't my best self when I was alone with him. I was at capacity. I was running a doula collective. I was busy with my own clients. I could tell I was sort of shortchanging him with my attention. I had a smartphone. I felt fractured — my attention was taken from my child, and I knew it.

Britta Bushnell: Oh, and so many parents feel that. Oh, and this

Domino Kirk Badgley: was 17 years ago, so it wasn't even the level of a smartphone that we have today. I was like, "I'm a single mom, I have to make money, but I also have a life, and maybe I should start dating," and my brain was — I was not present with my kid, and when someone would come over and hang out with me — not like a friend, I didn't necessarily need playdates — I needed witnessing as a mom, to uplevel my parenting. And what I've noticed is a lot of people — it's that same individualization, that individual thing — everyone is being

Britta Bushnell: independent. Be independent. I'm good with

Domino Kirk Badgley: my kid. I know how to play with my kid. I don't need anyone. We just need each other. And it's just you and him — that psychic energy loop with my son was so overwhelming for me, and some people pride themselves on having good relationships with their kids and not needing a partner, and blah blah blah. And for me, when I look back, I actually feel like I did some of my worst parenting as a solo parent — not just because I was alone, but because I wasn't holding myself accountable. The bar wasn't very high. I was just letting my kid witness me overwhelmed.

Britta Bushnell: You weren't getting the witnessing,

Domino Kirk Badgley: None. And I had a co-parent who struggled with alcohol at the time, so it was inconsistent witnessing from him. And then, cut to five years later, I have a new relationship, I'm married, I have a five-year-old child now. And even today, if I know I'm going to be alone with any of my kids, I just invite people over to have tea, because it takes that relationship and just brings the witnessing of me parenting. It changes the way I connect to the child by having that person watch me, and I now have a rule that I'm not solo with my kids — even if it's a friend or someone not that close to me, someone in my — I just always make sure someone is witnessing, and it changes the way everyone — because we're actually not meant to be — we've never ever been alone with kids. It's always been a village. We've always been held by the layers of community, and for the first time, this generation is truly alone.

Britta Bushnell: I love — we're back to layering the layering of community, like we need that 13-layer cake

Domino Kirk Badgley: and how many community — in Brooklyn alone I can speak to the culture here — there's so much just mom, dad, child, mom, dad, child — the little triad, everyone going, together. It's just them in the corner of their little apartment in Brooklyn, it's just them against the world, and then the occasional playdate, and that's not it. And the way we're doing it is harming us, and it's harming our relationships to each other. We got the highest divorce rates ever, and the fear of having a second kid because the first was so crazy is the narrative, right? Like, "Oh, it was such a rupture, I don't know if I could do it again" — and that's so crazy, because the one-and-done thing, I think, is a symptom of not being held adequately, and learning how to do that is the work, because no one's going to teach us how to ask for it. It comes from inner work.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, you're making me remember when my first was — I don't know, three or four months old — I had to go back to teaching yoga, and I didn't have regular childcare. It was me. The house that we lived in at the time was a house that had two houses on the driveway, and the other house was a woman who was an empty nester. Her kids were grown, they were gone, she had a dog — that was who she was. She would always make comments about my baby, and I asked her one day if she would ever watch him, and we ended up in a relationship — I didn't even really know her very well, we interacted regularly because we shared a driveway and general proximity, but she ended up taking care of my baby a couple of times a month when I went to go teach yoga, and I'm thinking about it now, and I'm kind of shocked that I asked her.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Well, it's that God thing, or that source thing. It's like you have a child, and you automatically have this — it's the thread that connects us to each other. It's the way people feel around death and around birth, right? Suddenly it's the universal language, and it's the same with childcare, and it's the same with becoming a parent. Everyone knows the way it smells and feels because we've all been born. We're here. I think I've written about this somewhere before, because it's coming back to my memory — but the way people are when they see someone in labor, you instantly, like, oh, you know what's going on. Everyone gets the memo, because birth is implicit, it's in our cells. But we all remember it, and I think it's the same when there are babies around. We've all been a baby before, and we know how to be with each other and hold each other, of course, within reason. And certain people probably —

Britta Bushnell: Some people don't, but yes, but

Domino Kirk Badgley: — have it very close to them. But it's in all of us. And I think we're starved for it — we all know we're starved for connection because of these bloody phones. But when it comes to postpartum, I'm speaking to random people on the street — if they have twins, I'm literally just approaching them, and I'm like, "Hi, do you want to sit down on this bench and talk?" And they're ready to. Their eyes tear up, and they can't believe that I want to do that.

Britta Bushnell: That's how I ended up finding other mom friends — I would basically

Domino Kirk Badgley: like

Britta Bushnell: coach anybody who had a baby. Yeah,

Domino Kirk Badgley: and the twin-spotting thing is — when I see twins, I'm literally harassing, I'm following them, and it makes me realize just how far away from each other we are. But that's — I mean, twins is a whole other thing, but with one baby, the amount of isolation is so scary. And I have to create these norms around me and these rules so that I don't do the Domino single-mom brain, because my husband even jokes with me, he's like, "You're married, I married you, you're not alone anymore, you can do this with me, remember, hi, I'm here," and I still have a bus driver that is on my bus that's like, "I have to do this alone." And there are so many people who have that mindset, and they bring it to their births and they bring it to postpartum, and it's who they are as parents.

Britta Bushnell: Yeah, and then they bump up against birth professionals who are ready to give them their whole life force.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yes, this brings us to our next — because it's the perfect storm, isn't it?

When Birth Professionals Become the Throne of the Parent

Britta Bushnell: It is a perfect — exactly. I often will say the child in us is looking for somebody who will help us still be a child.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Oh, for sure. Oh,

Britta Bushnell: and yet when we are becoming a parent, we need to take that journey into the other chair, the chair of the parent. But if our birth professionals — our OBs, our midwives, our doulas, our postpartum doulas — are sitting in the throne of the parent, saying, "Don't worry, sweetheart, I'll take care of you,"

Domino Kirk Badgley: Oh yeah, it's like candy, right? It's just like, "Oh my god, this person" — I did it with my midwife for my first. She gave me so much of her — the ego — she led with this ego pattern of, "I'm a really great midwife, you'll have your baby at home, no doubt," and I ate it up. In my very immature brain, it was, "She's gonna do this for me." And there I was, day four of a home birth, wondering why I still didn't have my baby in my arms, because I had the most competent midwife in New York City — what was going on? And I was giving her my power. And we say a lot in our trainings, if we don't equip families to do this without you, then we've failed them. If this is about you and who you are in this picture, then you're doing this for the wrong reasons. The ego hit that doulas get when they start the work is so strong, and I actually in 2018 had to create a little forum area, a space for people to examine and reflect on their why. I didn't want a nuts-and-bolts doula mentorship. There's too many coming out of the woodwork. I wanted a place to park it — let's put it down, park it, talk about why you're here. And so many people, by the end of the mentorship — I shared this with you when we first met, Britta — I was happy when I made people stop and rethink their path to becoming a doula, when they were like, "Oh, actually —" and I was like, "Yes, not that I don't want more doulas, please, please, but I want them, I want adult doulas."

Britta Bushnell: You want the eyes open, yeah.

The Doula's Doula: A Mentorship Born from Parking the Ego

Domino Kirk Badgley: And grownups — I think so many doulas are still operating from such young parts of themselves. And if you've heard of IFS or parts therapy, this will only help you understand me more. I ended up calling it the doula's doula — then someone else decided to do a training called the doula's doula, so I was like, maybe this isn't even the doula's doula, this is just a space, I'm not doula-ing the doula. A lot of people who come to me are doula-curious. They haven't started, but they're so excited to quit their jobs and become doulas. I'm like, "Oh God, do you know what you're doing?"

Britta Bushnell: And it's important to help them answer that question of do they know what they're doing, and that's

Domino Kirk Badgley: what we get to do, because the

Britta Bushnell: doula-curious is actually coming from the innocent — the archetype of the innocent that's like, "Oh, hey," or the seeker — but it's not coming from the adult, not yet.

From Trauma to Calling: Domino's Own Birth Story

Domino Kirk Badgley: Exactly, and there's a lot of young consciousness in the new doula. How do I be with them, hold them, teach them that they're worth parenting or worth listening to? So many of us get people who are quitting their big office jobs to become a doula, willing to take such a crazy pay cut, and I'm like, "You have children, and —" I love it, "I had such a beautiful birth, I have to become a doula," and I'm like, "No, actually" — it's the people that I've noticed — this might not be the case for other people, but what I've seen is that people who have had beautiful births really struggle as doulas initially, because they have to unpack and untangle what they believe the role is and how they're coming to it, and it takes a long time. The ones who saw the other side, the dark side of the industry, the industrial complex — they're more detached and available and spacious as doulas. They're like, "I know stuff goes wrong. I know babies don't always make it. I know the cesarean you were terrified of happens. I know that epidural you swore you weren't going to get happens." But the worst —

Britta Bushnell: especially, though, if they know about that and aren't — one of the things I've seen is people who come to birth work from the place of, "I want to save people from the bad experience that I had, the traumatic experience that I had," and that can create the white-horse doula, which can backfire also, because that comes in with a place of, "I will save you," rather than —

Domino Kirk Badgley: where you are with yourself when you don't — and your client gets the cesarean birth, your client decides to get an epidural when they swore they wouldn't, and you said, "We'll get through it." I was that doula. I had a four-day home birth that resulted in a uterine infection that became a cesarean at fully dilated, and then C-diff, back in the hospital for 10 days. I went to war. Everything that went wrong, other than — thank God — me getting a baby that was thriving and alive. I got a baby, but my body and my spirit and my psyche, everything was decimated after that birth. And when I went into birth work, I was drawn to teen parents, people who were alone, people who were — I had drug-addicted teens, the people who had the hardest situations. My first 20 births were with the hardest-done-by people, and I remember being like, "I'm gonna make the difference," because no one made the difference for me, and my doulas were not present. And I love — one of them is a dear friend now, many years later — but I remember feeling dropped by my team, and also young and not available to go, "Hmm, I wonder if I could have a better situation, or a different team." I just took what I got, and it was all around my mother, all around self-worth and deserving love, feeling lovable — being around ego-maniacal women was really easy for me, and I just repeated it. It was carbon copy. And that was how I approached my career until it was so obvious that my son was harmed and hurting because of how busy I was. I was leaving my own child to go and work because I needed to pay bills. I had an intense case of workaholism — I had to, and it was also a way for me to numb out my birth experience. I got to forget what happened to me and be the white horse for these other people. And things happened — clients started to see the cracks in me, because when I would be that for someone and the birth would work out, like the birth plan went well,

Britta Bushnell: yes

The White Horse Doula and the God Complex

Domino Kirk Badgley: I would go, "Thank god" — like my God complex, you know —

Britta Bushnell: yeah

Domino Kirk Badgley: and then finally, I think it started to break down. It stopped working, and I —

Britta Bushnell: and there was some maturation that happened.

Domino Kirk Badgley: I was because,

Britta Bushnell: yeah, I mean, when you get raw, when you get to a place where you don't have capacity, things break down, and we start to look under the hood of our own engine and say, "Wow, something's not working here."

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah, and I kept getting hired, and my world still reflected, "Oh, you should do this, oh you're good at this, oh, you have a collective now, people know you, they want to hire you" — I was still getting the hits, but internally I was going, "This isn't working because you're not believing your own story anymore." That's what really started to happen.

Britta Bushnell: What I love is that you have gone through so many of these arcs and deepenings. It really sounds like — and I feel this whenever we're together — the continued deepening, and to be able to mentor others from a place of humility. It's like the depths — when you go to the underworld, you're stripped of the ego.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Yeah, and I was like, how can I not want to attend births from that place? Because to me, that detached — for me, when I had was full of myself and full of my narratives about who I am to these people and to my family, I was running on such a high, but I was also running on empty. It was so unsustainable. So when I decided to stop being on call, and stop getting that hit, stop leaving my child, find other ways to be in the work but without leaving myself, leaving my kid — there's plenty of ways. The birth world now, talk about layers, there are so many ways for us to be of service and not run ourselves ragged. And then there are genuinely some doulas out there that I feel have set up their lives to be on call, and they're not really harmed by it — they're equipped for it, for whatever reason. A lot of doulas I know have autoimmune disease. A lot of them are addicted to pot, or are constantly at odds with a spouse, because their life is like you're constantly leaving and coming and going, you're really leaving base camp all the time, and it's unsteady, destabilizing for families.

Burnout Beyond Doulas: Nurses, Bodyworkers, and Everyone Who Serves

Domino Kirk Badgley: And when I started the mentorship I now have, it was out of a place, out of a need for doulas to pause and ask if this lifestyle was actually working for them, and so many people would come and totally break down and say, no, "I'm so high on serving and helping that I've completely lost touch with who I am and what I want, and I don't recognize my life at home, or I live on my phone, I live to be called out, and I'm hurting." And I didn't just get birth doulas. I got labor and delivery nurses. I got bodyworkers, massage therapists — just people who live to serve.

Britta Bushnell: Right, in the service, giving, caregiving kind of role, yeah, and the

Domino Kirk Badgley: heal-the-healer — like it's hip now, thank god it is. But I was like, okay, what is this space? Who's it for? How do I hold people through this? And it really became my passion. I want to be with people before they jump in, or the space that they come back to when they're backpedaling and going, "I'm not so sure about this decision I made," and to make sure that they feel like there are other options — give them the choices. People who have gone from birth doulas to postpartum, to lactation specialists, who believe that they are of value in the birth space, but maybe not equipped or have the capacity to be on call. And I've met so many people now who go, "Wow, I didn't even know that was actually happening for me — that I was actually trying to wriggle my way out of being a birth doula, but felt so pulled to be of service that I was just ignoring all my own body's cues, my children's cues, my relationships." I was like, "Oh my god, you needed permission to bow out of the cool job of doula-ing." Everyone's a doula now — sorry, I mean, I get it, you needed permission to be like, "Actually, I did the training, and I'm scared to be a doula. It's not what I thought it was. I'm not okay with death. I'm not okay with not going to bed for four days." And I was like, "Great, come hang out. Admit that, because once you do, you'll have your answer." I've had people who are like, "I'm a doula, and — I know you have the same" — that people are choosing to be a doula as a way of being sort of defiant in their families, right? Parents who are doctors or in business, and like, "I'm going to go do this thing that's going to really irritate them," and I'm like, "Oh my god, we're all a really edgy —"

Defiance, Permission, and Choosing to Stop

Britta Bushnell: career. Yeah, and it's, I mean, in reality, it's a really intense career,

Domino Kirk Badgley: so intense, and if you don't get off on that intensity, and you don't, as you get older — it's less sexy, it's less fun. Then you just need — and I'm not saying quit, because it's the most gratifying, most needed profession out there, and yet the way people use it is problematic. And that's why I decided, if I don't create — so now my mentorship's called the Space and Time Mentorship, because it's literally for people who don't know how to give themselves space and time, and that's a norm with caregivers, right? It's just the baseline thing, they struggle with it so much, and so I was like, "What if we call it space and time?" Because we're just taking that to reflect and to see if this is exactly what we want and what we thought it would be. It's my favorite space to be in. It's so confronting, but so intimate, and so delicious.

Britta Bushnell: And people get to be in community with you in all these layers of depth and curiosity. I think that curiosity is so vital — the asking of those questions, that guiding people to look inside, and

Domino Kirk Badgley: yeah, and you come out better for it. You might be a better birth doula for being in this group, because you feel really solid and so confirmed in your choice to be a doula after a space like that. But if you're getting trained and then you jump in, you get your Instagram account, and you figure out you're like, "I'm a doula now," and you jump in, you suddenly have all these clients, you don't get a moment. It's so easy. You

Britta Bushnell: don't get the space and time.

Domino Kirk Badgley: You don't. You definitely don't. You don't get

Britta Bushnell: the space and time.

Domino Kirk Badgley: The beauty that I have — the luck, I feel so lucky that I'm able to straddle these two things, because Carriage House has a doula collective, we're an agency, so we feel it's kind of a gift that we're able to see the other side when parents are emailing us telling us how they had the experience they had of the doula that they hired in our collective — for better or worse, right, we get the complaints. We hear of the doulas that didn't show up. Why? They had too many clients. They overslept. They're maxed out. People wanting refunds — they didn't get what they thought. This doula performed beautifully prenatally, but on the day wasn't who I thought she would be. We've seen it all, and we take that feedback and we bring that to the training, we bring that to these little offshoot mentorships. We know the complexities that people have when they're hiring this kind of help, and we really want to bring that into the fold, and it really helps our doulas to hear that.

Connecting with Domino and Carriage House Birth

Britta Bushnell: Oh, I'm sure. So, if people want to find out more about your mentorship, about Carriage House Birth, where do people find you?

Domino Kirk Badgley: My mentorship — I'm restarting it, it was dark for a bit because of giving birth. But I'm gonna be bringing it back October 6th, and it's just my website, dominokirk.com. That's the personal, private mentorship. And then Carriage House has trainings in birth and postpartum, and that's just carriagehousebirth.com. And

Britta Bushnell: that's also on Instagram.

Domino Kirk Badgley: Also on Instagram, yeah, we do virtual and in-person trainings.

Britta Bushnell: Love that. So as we bring our conversation to a close, I like to end with one question, and that's: what's one thing you feel passionately about that you want new or expectant parents to see, hear, feel, or know during this profound period of their lives? And I know it's hard to say one thing, but if there is one thing —

Closing Reflection: Turn Up the Volume on What You Already Know

Domino Kirk Badgley: that you intuitively know your child better than anyone, anything, any book, any advice. The idea that you have the information and the wisdom inherently and implicitly. I feel like I spend so much of my time as a doula, but also just as a friend and as a parent, reminding people that they already know, but it's just getting the voice — turning the voice up, because it's so quiet after you give birth to your first child, and your head is buried in your phone, buried in your laptop, and you're imagining that you can't do it because you've got all of this programming from your own parents and all these things — that you already know is what I'm passionate about.

Britta Bushnell: I love that — turning the volume up on what you already know. Oh, thank you so much, Domino. It's so good to be with you, and thank you, listeners, for sharing this time with us. If something shared today impacted, supported, or moved you, please share this episode with a friend. I produce this podcast myself, and your support makes it possible. To show a little love for the podcast and these conversations, please follow, rate, and review. If you'd like to continue the conversation, please join us on Instagram at Transformed by Birth. I look forward to being with you again on the next episode of Transformed by Birth. Now let's gather what we want to take away from this episode and this conversation with Domino, and breathe it in on an inhale. And on the exhale, I'll blow out our candle. Until next time, bye, friends.