In a graceful and deeply candid reflection, Buffalo Bills WAG Daiyaana Muhammad — fiancée of offensive lineman Dion Dawkins — reveals why it takes a ‘strong woman’ to stand beside an NFL player, hinting at the quiet resilience and unspoken sacrifices behind their life in the spotlight.
Muhammad is engaged to offensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills Dion Dawkins
Daiyaana Muhammad and Dion Dawkins.
Daiyaana Muhammad wears many hats, and — as a model, it’s no wonder she wears them well.
Originally from Los Angeles, Muhammad began her modeling career when she was around 18 years old, which was around the same time that her passion for nursing began to ramp up.
After finishing nursing school, Muhammad relocated to Atlanta, working on the dialysis floor at Emory University for a couple of years, as well as in pediatric emergency, until she met her now fiancé, offensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills Dion Dawkins.
She relocated to Buffalo, where she worked in the NICU for a time until she had her first child. Around the same time, she completed a master’s and started teaching nursing school at Chamberlain University before she reintegrated into the modeling world. And if that wasn’t enough, she’s also spent time as a Pilates instructor.
The trajectory — modeling to nursing school to a fully-fledged career in emergent care to going back to school to teaching to Pilates — might sound exhausting to the average person.
But Muhammad has it figured out, right down to a science.
She says her superhuman-like ability to manage it all comes from advice given to her by an older nurse, who would frequently come to work incredibly happy and upbeat.
Her secret?
“You have to fill your cup up first and then you’re able to give like your best to all the situations,” Muhammad explains.
For Muhammad, this means doing the little things like starting her day off meditating with her three children, to “recenter” themselves.
She prioritizes “go-getting,” as it’s in her nature.
“I can do this, and I can do that. I can go to Paris Fashion Week and can still make it to my man’s game on Sunday. You know?” she says.
Part of her secret for balancing all the moving parts of her day is knowing that it doesn’t take 24/7 investment for time spent with someone to be valuable.
“I make sure that my time counts,” she explains. “When my fiancé comes home from work, I make sure that he has like my undivided attention.”
While some other significant others of athletes have mixed emotions about the term WAG, Muhammad calls it what it is: an identifier.
“It embodies like the wife and the girlfriends of an athlete,” she says, calling it a “fact.” And the community she has found as a result of that identifier, she says, has meant “everything” to her.
“We just like understand each other, you know?” she says. “A lot of people see the glitz and glam, but, you know, we feel guilty complaining about the other part that people don’t see, you know?”
It takes a “strong woman” to be in her position, she says, explaining that outside the glitz and glam, there’s a whole host of things that WAGs have to manage.
“We have to manage our fans, you know, we have to manage our community, we have to manage other women, we have to manage not being around our men for a lot of time… we have to manage our men’s mental health and then still have a strong face for our kids,” she reveals.
Because the WAG lifestyle is so “unique,” Muhammad says she’s found that some people “don’t look at us as regular people.”
And perhaps they’re right. Muhammad’s lifestyle isn’t regular by any means: when she’s not spending time wrangling her kids, jetting off to Fashion Weeks, attending Dawkins’ games or performing as the acting “nurse WAG” for the other Bills wives and girlfriends, she and Dawkins are finding time for their relationship in some pretty unusual ways.
“We’re definitely a different vibey couple,” she says, going on to reveal that the two of them enjoy hobbies like drift-car racing and skiing when they have free time.
It all comes back to “filling your cup,” she continues.
“You have to have your own sense of self, your own confidence,” she says, of making in the WAG world. “You can’t not know yourself being in these environments. You have to just be comfortable in your own skin.”
Her hope, as with everything that she practices and preaches — filling your cup, finding time for yourself and spending quality time with the people and communities that she cares about — is that it will eventually translate to her children.
“There’s a lot of lights looking at you, people are looking at you. People have opinions, people have stuff to say,” she says emphatically. “If you’re confident within yourself in this space and you know who you are, that will exude to your children as well.”
