La Rue Advises Mothers To ‘Forgive Yourself’

Actress Eva La Rue (Natalia Boa Vista) balances her job on CSI: Miami with being a single mother to her seven-year-old daughter, Kaya.

Balancing work, family, music and charity isn’t an easy job for La Rue. “It’s tough,” she said. “Any mom who tells you that she does it effortlessly is not telling the truth. You feel like you’re never quite doing enough or giving 100 percent to one or the other. Something is always going to slide, so you kind of pick your spots. If it’s a really important episode, you give 100 percent of your attention to the episode and if it’s not, then you’re giving 110 percent to your kid and your life and the rest of your family.”

Nobody can do it all, La Rue said. “Forgive yourself,” she advised. “You’re always going to feel guilty about something. If there’s one piece of valuable information I wish I had in the beginning, it’s this — allow yourself the guilt. It’s okay. There’s no way around it.”

The actress said she doesn’t have a role model for parenting because “everyone’s struggling to keep the balance.” She added, “There are people that look like they’re doing it brilliantly and maybe they are, but maybe they just look like that from the outside. Unfortunately if you measure yourself up against other people that look like they’re doing it well, you’re never going to feel like you’re doing okay.”

For La Rue, the hardest part has been “[n]avigating the single-mother waters with a little girl.” The actress was engaged last year, but she and Joe Cappuccio broke up. “Kaya was very attached to him and I really didn’t know how to walk her through the break-up,” La Rue revealed. “She didn’t get a say in that and yet she was pretty heart-broken. When someone gradually leaves your life, that’s one thing because you get used to the end of it. When somebody disappears, it takes all of your control away. It leaves you frantic and that [break-up] left her in a frantic space because she had no control over it.”

La Rue got in touch with Cappuccio several months later and asked him to contact Kaya. “It put her back in the power position of saying ‘I’ll call him when I want to and he’ll talk to me and say he misses me and we’ll have a conversation that doesn’t include Mama at all,'” the actress explained. “As soon as she was able to have those conversations whenever she wanted to, she didn’t want to anymore. She controlled the situation again. A lot of my friends were against that. A lot of them said she’ll just get over it but she really wasn’t and she really needed to get closure herself.”

La Rue has been dating a single father for about five months. “I have a rule of thumb now and that’s that somebody has to have been married and they have to have had kids,” she said of her new dating guidelines. “Everything boils down to perspective. If your potential mate does not have the same perspective that you do then you’re going to be lost.” One thing La Rue has done to make things easier on her daughter is keep her life and her boyfriend’s life more separate. “She knows him and we spend time together with all the kids playing and hanging out and stuff, but it’s a friendlier relationship where there’s no chance of getting super attached to anyone,” she said.

The actress brings her daughter to the Miami set, but she doesn’t let her watch the show. “[I]t’s a little scary,” La Rue revealed. “It’s a little dark and people are always dead in the beginning and it’s a little gruesome but she does come to the set a lot. The hair and makeup department will always sit her in the chair and give her wounds or black eyes or scrapes so that she can see that it’s all pretend. She LOOOOOVES that. The only problem is that she walks around and says, ‘My mama did this to me.’ I have to tell her ‘Hold on a second. That wasn’t quite the deal.'”