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Surrounded by toys and with a big Christmas tree behind her, a very young Eva Mendes looks at the camera, smiling and dressed in a cute red jumpsuit while lovingly holding a baby doll in her hands. The actress shared this new throwback snap on social media showing her fans and followers that she was always destined for parenting, even though she didn’t picture herself as a mother... until Ryan Gosling “happened.”
In an interview for Women’s Health, the actress revealed that motherhood was “the furthest thing in my mind.” But it all changed when she met the future father of her two daughters, five-year-old Esmeralda and three-year-old Amada. After falling in love with Ryan, the actress explained that the idea started to become logical: “It made sense for me to have… not kids, but his kids. It was very specific to him.”
Eva and Ryan met in 2011 while shooting A Place Behind the Pines and started dating briefly after the movie was finished. Since then, they have created a beautiful family with their two daughters, and being both very private people, they try to keep them out of the spotlight and raise them in as normal an environment as is possible for two A-list parents to maintain.
Eva admitted in the same interview that their family have been an important part in the process. “We have an amazing support group: Ryan’s mom, my mom, Ryan’s and my sisters. It’s a village that helped us. My heart goes out to women who do this alone. I basically come from a single-parent household; although I love my dad, my mom mostly raised four of us on her own.”