Eva Mendes Giving Up Acting Reminds Us Women Have A Choice

Feminism is about empowering those choices, not tearing them down

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A little housekeeping…

I know it’s been a minute since I wrote, but I rest assured, I have agonized and beat myself up about every second I wasn’t posting something. I’m going to blame my anxiety and undiagnosed ADHD for my inability to sit down and write something no matter how much I want to. You’re welcome. Also! I have officially hit 100 subscribers! I appreciate everyone who has subscribed — it felt like I was never going to get here. Thank you to my friends who have recommended Words with Sa’iyda to their followers, it really warms my heart. I know I am absolute crap at writing more consistently — I keep saying that I will get better about it, and then life happens and I just don’t. But I really want to do some cool stuff here, including interviews and features and maybe even some podcasts episodes? Some of that will be easier the bigger my audience is, so if you enjoy what you read, PLEASE share it and suggest that people subscribe! I know my content has been kind of all over the place, but I’m really going to push in the pop culture direction. 

The main event…

I know I’ve said it previously, but given how much of my past (and current) work revolve around parenting, I’m really trying to avoid writing too much parenting content here, but if it happens to fall at the intersection of parenting and pop culture, trust that I will likely want to write about it. 

And that’s what pulled me out of my writing funk. Wednesday, a clip of Eva Mendes being interviewed for the “Today Show” went viral. She was on the show to promote a new line of sponges she’s promoting. But the sponges weren’t the thing people were talking about. In the interview, Eva admitted that she gave up her acting career to raise her two daughters that she shares with Ryan Gosling. Suddenly women all over Twitter were having a heart attack and saying that he forced her to give up her acting career to raise their girls. The way they reacted made me wonder: whatever happened to choice?

“It was almost just like a non-verbal agreement that it was like, ‘Ok, he’s going to work and I’m going to work, I’m just going to work here,'” she said in the interview, adding that it was a “no-brainer” to put her career on hold to raise her daughters, who are 9 and 7. “I still worked, I just didn’t act because acting takes you on locations, it takes you away,” she clarified.

I feel like we forget that for a lot of moms, working is not a choice they get to make. The cost of living has become so high, and wages have stayed stagnant, so most moms are forced to work, even though they’d much rather be at home raising their children. Most stay-at-home moms now are doing it by choice, either because they have the privilege to not have to work, or because working would actually be more of a financial detriment to their family. Of course, there are moms who genuinely love working and would work even if they didn’t have to. But I bet if they could, they would find a healthy balance between working and raising their children. I don’t know any mom who doesn’t want to be as present as possible for their kids. 

Last year when I had a more flexible schedule, I volunteered weekly at my son’s school. One day I ran into the mom of one of his classmates at the grocery store. We chatted for a bit, and then she asked, “you volunteer with the kids a lot, don’t you?” I said yes, and then her whole demeanor changed. “I wish I had the time to do that, you’re lucky.” I was incredibly lucky, but I didn’t tell her that I was underemployed and was volunteering so I didn’t sit at home constantly stewing in my own misery about having to give up my dream job and hating my life. 

The issue with the reaction to what Eva said is that the women who are blaming Ryan Gosling are forgetting about choice. Never once did she say, “Ryan forced me to quit acting and raise our children.” Just because it was a non-verbal agreement doesn’t mean that he made the decision for her. She literally said that acting takes you away from home and she didn’t want to be away from her girls when they were little. Since her career was basically at a standstill (she seems lovely, but she’s not ever going to be a great actress, which is fine!), she made the choice to give up Hollywood for motherhood. Not once in the interview did she say she regrets her decision. She actually acknowledged how lucky she is to be able to have this time actively raising her kids!

Look, if I could, I would give up the grind of working and be a fully stay-at-home mom. I would still write, but I would do it when I wanted to, and not because I had to pay the rent. It would be amazing to be able to write what I want to and not grind out a bunch of words because we need to eat. I was raised by a SAHM, and I know the amount of freedom that having an older kid comes with. If I was in a relationship with an Oscar nominated actor who made bank with every project, my Black ass would be sat on my couch or going to yoga during the day. And Eva stays busy, she’s just not acting! She has her sponge line, she’s got a jewelry collab, she’s done other business stuff. But that’s all stuff she can do from her home office and be able to pick her girls up at 3 o’clock. 

The shock and anger at her feels like it’s a product of the mentality of second wave feminism. In the 70s, women fought for the right to buck tradition. If they didn’t want to get married (or stay married) or have children, that was their choice. And despite it being a choice, they had a lot to say about the women who made the choice to do those things. Of course some of those women were puppets for the far right conservative movement, but that doesn’t mean that every woman who wanted to be a wife and mother was a shill for the Republican party. Some of them genuinely wanted to live that comfortable life! But that’s the thing about choice: everyone is going to make the one that’s best for them. But for those feminists, the only valid choice was theirs.

Honestly, it feels reductive to measure every woman by the same measurement. If we’re all doing the same thing, then where’s the fun? We rightfully uplift and applaud women for knowing that marriage and children aren’t for them, but at the same time, we throw women who want that stuff under the bus as anti-feminist. Why does it have to be one extreme or the other? We can all live the lives we want to that work for us. Women should be celebrated for getting a PhD the same way they’re celebrated for having a baby. But wanting to have a baby doesn’t make a woman a victim of the patriarchy.

Women who want to solely be wives and mothers are often bullied in the feminism conversation. And why? Because they want to follow the “traditional” route? I’m sorry, I thought that the point of feminism was to empower women to do what felt right for them, not making them all follow the same agenda. If you’re fighting for the rights of all women, doesn’t that include women who want to follow the path that many women before them followed? Shouldn’t they feel empowered in the choice they made? Just because not all of us were built to be wives and mothers doesn’t mean that those who were are less than us. I can’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t want to be a wife and mom. I also knew that I had aspirations to have a career. And I felt empowered to make the choices that felt right for me. Of course, circumstances dictated that I was going to go about my journey a little differently, but now I have both an awesome family of my own and a career that I genuinely love. It’s amazing that I’ve been empowered and uplifted enough to be the main breadwinner in my family. And thanks to feminism, I never felt an ounce of shame at being a single mom, even though it was hard. Again, I felt empowered that I could do hard shit. Isn’t that the whole point?

If Eva Mendes wants to sit at home and count her money (because girlfriend has a pretty huge net worth without her man) and raise her girls and bake fucking cookies every day, what’s it to anyone else? She is living the life she chose to live. We’re all living the lives we chose to live. And that’s what feminism is supposed to be about.