Eva Mendes, who's now been a mom for more than five years, knows that motherhood is all about working hard and definitely not a joke. Chatting with singer Kelly Clarkson on her new daytime talk show on Thursday, the actress got extremely candid about her struggles with being a stay-at-home mom.
Speaking to Clarkson, Mendes confessed that taking a break from acting to stay and take care of her two daughters, Amada Lee and Esmeralda Amada, was much more difficult than she had originally planned when she and Ryan Gosling first became parents.
"Every day," said the 45-year-old actress, when she was asked by Clarkson about the time she realized she had "picked the way harder job" as compared to her acting career. "People are so sweet — they really try to warn you, prep you, when you're pregnant, but nobody can prep you. Nobody."
"And nobody told me it was gonna really be a job. And a job that I needed an incredible amount of skill for, in different areas," she continued, while also jokingly listing out the few hats she dons for her kids: "A chauffeur, a cook, a personal assistant to an abusive boss."
"They don't appreciate it!" Clarkson agreed, since she's also a mother to two kids, her 3½-year-old son Remington "Remy" Alexander and daughter River Rose. "No, they don't! They're not grateful! Oh my God, do they get grateful? Does that happen at some point?" Mendes asked the audience at one point.
"In any other profession, you'd need to take a test or pass tests. The only test I had to pass was a pregnancy test," the Ghost Rider actress continued to joke. "That doesn't seem fair, right?"
During her time on the show, The Other Guys star revealed that she and Gosling have similar parenting styles at home with their two daughters. And their parenting techniques aren't the most lax.
"We're very controlling," she said. "I think what the term is — we're always laughing at these terms — I think we would be 'bulldozing parents'. The stakes are really high so yeah, I'm a helicopter parent," she added. "And then I heard the bulldozing and I'm like, 'Ooh, yeah, I'm probably a bulldozing parent too.' "
