Eva Mendes' life took a turn for the unexpected when she met her longtime love Ryan Gosling. Before she knew it, she was a mother of two girls, something that was a distant thought at one point in time. “It was the furthest thing from my mind,” Eva said in Women’s Health magazine. “Ryan Gosling happened. I mean, falling in love with him. Then it made sense for me to have…not kids, but his kids. I was very specific to him.” The two Place Behind the Pines stars are parents to Esmeralda, four, and two-year-old Amada.
Eva Mendes shared that she didn't just want to have kids, but wanted to have Ryan Gosling's kids
The 45-year-old actress, who admitted that she is just getting out of “survival mode” and “feeling like a person again,” pulls inspiration from her own mother when it comes to raising her daughters. “I basically come from a single-parent household; although I love my dad, my mom mostly raised four of us on her own…She was the mom in Cuba who had to walk however many miles to fetch water from the well,” the Hitch actress shared. “That was her reality for a while, so the level of respect and appreciation I have for her now is incredible.”
She continued: “We didn’t have much growing up. My mother would say, ‘As little as we have, there are so many people who have less.’ She made me appreciate that from an early age.” Keeping her mother’s lessons in mind, Eva noted that although her children were born into a family with more support and resources, it’s all about being grounded.
“What I try to emphasize is that I don’t let them see me put attention to how I dress. They’ve never seen me get ready for something; they’ve never seen me at work,” she said. “Which is fine, for whoever wants to do it that way, but the way I keep it normal is by not letting them see me in these situations. I’m just Mom. And I’m more than happy to just be Mom.”
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© Molly Creeden
