Penn Badgley’s wife, Domino Kirke, is looking back at a particularly difficult day in her career as a doula.
“I had a miscarriage in my second trimester,” Kirke, 42, wrote in the caption of an Instagram post on Friday, September 4. “After an awful D&C procedure, I went home to recover for a few days, plodded around on the piano, and wrote this song ‘Mercy’ … and went to support someone giving birth just a few days after that, still bleeding.”
The “Teething” singer added that instead of calling a colleague for support, she felt obligated to be a “superhero.”
“[I] crawled around in the night, high on my own supply and the adrenaline of birth, saving mothers and babies no matter what,” she continued. “It cost me my health (autoimmune disease), friendships, my relationship with my child and husband.” (Kirke is a mom to son Cassius, 17, with ex Morgan O’Kane. She and Badgley, 39, share a 6-year-old son and twin boys born in September 2025.)
“Not even my own grief could stop me,” Kirke wrote. “Actually, back then, that’s why I behaved this way — I couldn’t be with my grief. It wasn’t ‘til I was teaching a doula training many months later that I had to excuse myself and sob quietly in the bathroom for the first time since the procedure.”
Kirke concluded, “The role of a caregiver is too important. Your own grief and traumas will always follow you and come out sideways. It’s only a matter time [sic]. You deserve to do this work with a solid foundation of support and skills so that you can sustain yourself in it. Our clients deserve to be held by adults who have many tools in their basket, because the impact caregivers make on their clients is truly lifelong.”
In the Instagram post, Kirke admitted that her “workaholism and people pleasing” had reached an “all time low.”
“I had no tools or skills. My marriage was falling apart because this was our second miscarriage in a row. I had no idea how to ask another doula to tap me out without feeling like a burden or failure,” she wrote.
Kirke then warned, “I find that this way of being in the caregiver role is all too common. If this is how you parent or were parented, then you have no shot as a professional caregiver if you don’t do the deeper work of examining your story. Burnout, at the very least, is coming for you.”
Badgley and Kirke tied the knot in 2017 and nearly split after they experienced two consecutive miscarriages, the Gossip Girl alum revealed last year.
“This was our second loss together, a time when I did not feel as though the cycle would break,” he wrote in his essay collection, Crushmore: Essays on Love, Loss, and Coming-of-Age, which was released in October 2025. “My wife and I neared separation, as many do after losses like that, largely because we felt so isolated in a culture that doesn’t talk much about these things or know how to support those going through it.”
Badgley continued, “Seeing our still baby in that tripped-out black and white sono imagery is a dreadful memory I can’t shake every time we go for a sonogram now.”
Badgley later shared on the “Totally Booked With Zibby” podcast that he had written the essay before his twins were born.
“And now I feel like I am, I mean this with love, but I feel like I’m drowning in children,” he said. “So it’s harder to get in touch with that feeling of loss. Because my cup truly runneth over.”
