Eva Longoria says motherhood has changed her.
TooFab caught up with the producer and actress at her eighth annual Eva Longoria Foundation gala in Beverly Hills on Friday, where she opened up about the unexpected impact her son has had on her.
“Oh my gosh, the one thing I did not expect when Santi was born was the amount of anxiety I was gonna have about the world,” Longoria said when asked how having a little one of her own — 17-month-old Santiago Enrique Baston — has changed her perspective. “Everything affects me now — the news and articles and climate change — everything scares me. And my anxiety has just gone through the roof, going, ‘Oh my God, I have to leave the world a better place!’ So it’s made my philanthropic work more intense. It’s brought an insane intensity. I’m like, ‘We have to save the world! Oh my God!’ And I didn’t expect that.”
“Of course, I do charity work and I do philanthropy,” she added, “but now it like just means so much more.”
When TooFab asked if she found that intense anxiety to be debilitating or empowering, she chose the latter with no hesitation.
“No, it’s fueling,” she said. “I know. Sometimes the world’s issues are so big, you feel paralyzed. And I think that’s the misconception, is that you have to be rich and famous to do something. For me, every single person who can do something, you know, it’s like you recycling or [me] doing a charity event like this. There’s many levels of helping and doing, and so it’s sometimes overwhelming and paralyzing as the thought, but once you start doing, it’s easy.”
To date, Longoria’s namesake foundation, which she launched in 2012, has helped 23,000 Hispanic and Latina girls in the United States and Mexico build better futures for themselves and their families through education and entrepreneurship by focusing on STEM, college scholarships, mentorship, parent engagement, microloans and business training.
So what does a successful, talented, charitable, beautiful, married mother want for Christmas?
When forced to pick a “materialistic” present (she tried to get away with “world peace”), Longoria thought about it for a second, then revealed she’d like a toilet fit for a queen.
“I want one of those fancy toilets, you know those Japanese toilets? I want one of those,” she said, adding that her “Dora and the Lost City of Gold” co-star, Eugenio Derbez, has one. “He was talking about it, and I was like, ‘I want one of those!’ That might be on my Christmas list. It’s a good one.”
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