Being a new mom is rough on your sleep schedule, and Dominique Dillon is not exempt. The Memphis news anchor recently went viral after a viewer recorded the new mom falling asleep behind the anchor desk during a live broadcast.
The clip of the sleeping mom of two quickly made its way around the internet, and the response was not what many might expect.
Sleep is hard to come by
Dillon found herself on the short end of the parenting stick when sleep deprivation collided with one rough night for her teething infant. But the mom didn’t doze off for long. In fact, viewers wouldn’t even know she was asleep at first glance. She looks like she’s propping her head up in her hands and looking at something on the desk. It’s the TV-perfect face of makeup that hides the exhaustion and the not-so-obvious fact that she was sleeping. Even her coworkers didn’t notice at first, according to Dillon, when she recounted her story to The Today Show.
Her co-anchor poked fun after she awoke from her brief slumber. Before she could head home, the moment was already uploaded to social media, where it picked up momentum beyond the Memphis area. When the clip went viral, Dillon braced for the backlash, but was instead flooded with kindness.
Kindness flooded in
“So the night before, my husband, he worked a double at BNSF Railway. I have a two-year-old. I have an 8-month-old, and I was trying to get them down to sleep at eight o’clock, but my 8-month-old, she wasn’t having it,” Dillon explains. “She was teething, and I just couldn’t console her. I gave her some teething medicine, and nothing was working. Next thing you know, it’s 10:30-11 o’clock before I can actually get her down to sleep, then all I have is a couple of hours of rest before I have to be up in the morning and be at work.”
Because morning news anchors always look so chipper and well-rested, some may not realize quite how early they rise. Dillon has to wake up at 1:30 in the morning to head to work before most people are out of their beds. This means Dillon is typically sound asleep when most are just starting to wind down for the night. People within the news industry understand the struggle and immediately offered their support, but they weren’t alone.
Parents in solidarity
One commenter shares, “We’re all human, nobody’s perfect and we’re certainly not machines :).”
Another writes, “She shouldn’t feel ashamed!!! Being a mom is difficult! She’s basically doing two jobs!”
One person commiserates, “We are all human, life is exhausting.”
Someone else says, “Poor lady—completely exhausted. She’s so gorgeous snoozing though.”
The Today Show also highlighted a few comments, with one summing up Dillon’s reality wonderfully: “She has a little one at the house, so her nights are different right now.”
Anyone who has cared for an infant knows that the task is not for the weak. In addition to their erratic sleep, they can’t talk, so you spend a good while learning to differentiate between types of cries. They can’t walk for much of their first year, but once they’re mobile, they stay on the move. There’s no sitting down for parents. Plus, babies are always expelling a bodily fluid from one or more of their orifices because they lack motor control, which means parents are constantly cleaning. But they’re cute, and likely for that reason alone, the human race persists.
