Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling are new parents, but Mendes said in an interview on Tuesday that she won’t be celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday…at least not for herself.
Mendes, who is mom to 7-month old Esmeralda, says she hasn’t been a parent long enough to earn the honor of Mother’s Day, so she’s going to spend time with her own mom over the weekend.
“She’s had a really hard year. My brother’s sick, so it’s all about my mom, honoring her. We’re all going to go over to her house and bombard her with love,” Mendes said.
The actress spoke with Women’s Health Magazine earlier this year about being a new mom and said she doesn’t mind the long, sleepless nights as much as she thought she would because it just means she gets more time to bond with the baby. But as far as giving advice to other moms? Don’t come knocking at her door.
“I don’t feel like I’ve really earned the right. I want to respect all the moms out there. They’re going to be like, ‘You know what? You’re a few months in. Just shut up,'” Mendes said.
Mendes says she and Gosling chose the name Esmeralda because of their shared love of a certain book; the baby’s middle name is Amada, after her grandmother.
“We both love the Esmeralda character from the Victor Hugo novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame and just think it’s a beautiful name,” Mendes said. “Her middle is Amada, which was my grandmother’s name. It means ‘beloved’ in Spanish.”
Eva Mendes also spoke out against the media’s obsessive need to follow every celebrity’s “baby bump”, saying she finds it intrusive, and that she and Ryan made a decision early on that they would shield their daughter as much as possible from the ever-watchful eye of Hollywood.
“I think it’s unfair, but that’s our reality. So Ryan and I decided early on to give her as much privacy as we could. I know that it seems all very innocuous when you’re flipping through a tabloid at the doctor’s office or see a photo of a pregnant lady online, but I find the media’s ‘bump watch’ obsession to be both intrusive and stressful. So I made a decision to eject myself from it completely. I was like, ‘Annnnd I’m out.’”