Melissa Santos On The Difficulties Of Juggling Life on the Road With Being A Parent

In an interview with Wrestling Inc, Melissa Santos spoke about the difficulties of balancing her life on the road as a wrestling interview as well as managing her life as a mother. Here are highlights:

On the growth of Impact Wrestling: “There has definitely been growth when it comes to this big guy [motions to Brian Cage]. He was X Division champion. Now he is the Impact champion. I think he is representing them well. Not just because he is my soon-to-be husband and the father of my child, but because he is an incredible talent. He is just one of the amazing talents brought on in the past year, 18 months.”

On being on the road with their kid at home: “It can be a little difficult at times to get my schedule to correlate with the sitter, which the sitter is my mom. She is the only one to watch my baby. It works out. You creatively do things in a different way. You just have to be creative.”

On interacting with fans on Twitch during Impact commercials: “The first couple of weeks there was definitely some baby crying, but we have that under control now. We have a sitter to make sure she is corralled around that time, but that’s just the way it’s going to function for now because I’m doing it from home. Or the case I’m doing it from my hotel room. Many times, I’m on set shooting Impact. Then when I’m done, I switch over to do the Twitch. It’s fun. I like how organic it is. I like to have fun with people. You have the occasional wrestling troll who gets online and says, ‘Is that a baby in the background?’ Absolutely, I’m a mom. If you have a problem with a baby, then I can’t help you with that. I’ve been known to, I don’t want to say clap back, but clap back. I’m very defensive of the things I love. I love Impact. I love what we’re doing. I’m always going to defend the product. I do that on Twitch. Most fans, 99.99 percent are all for it. It’s great to interact with them on the chatrooms to get a feel of what they’re liking and not liking genuinely. It caters to the true Impact fan.”

On wanting to wrestle: “I originally started wrestling in this industry before my body didn’t allow me to do any of the bumping. I have a lot of bumps to fill in my card . I’d like to. I just had ACL surgery, so I can’t really do anything for a bit of time. Probably, seven more months. This happened training and took a bad step, but that’s just the way life is. You roll with the punches, literally and figuratively.”

On the future of Lucha Underground: “I don’t want to say it’s completely dead because obviously there are talks. I still work with AAA and Impact and Impact and AAA works together. We ideally would want that for Lucha in the future, but Lucha was a different product. It was TV. It was true to being a TV show. It was a little different. I don’t want to say there became too many cooks in the kitchen at the time, but I really feel hopefully once that gets dialed in, it can be handled in a better way. I feel people deserve to watch Lucha. It’s a great product. Not just because I was on it, but just because it was so different. It was a different type of wrestling. I had friends who didn’t watch wrestling when they were kids, but they started watching because it had a feel of a television show with wrestling in it. It grabbed different eyes.”