When Eva Mendes agreed to star in 2012’s “The Place Beyond The Pines” opposite Ryan Gosling, she had no idea the career move would impact her personal life forever. As she says in the new edition of Women’s Health, she wasn’t even thinking about settling down with someone or having kids at the time. Then, she says, “Ryan Gosling happened. I mean, falling in love with him. Then it made sense for me to have…not kids, but his kids. It was very specific to him.” Two years after the movie premiered, Eva and Ryan welcomed their first daughter, Esmeralda. A second daughter, Amada, followed in 2016. “We’re just starting to get out of survival mode. I’m starting to feel like a person again,” she says of parenthood. “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.” As a mom to two daughters today, Eva focuses on letting the girls know when she’s with the family, all that matters is Eva’s role as their mother. “hat 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 says. “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.”
