Jennifer Lopez has a special connection with fiancé Alex Rodriguez. She’s not the only one in her family who can say that.
The actress and recent Super Bowl halftime star said son Max and twin sister Emme took a shine to the former Yankees slugger early in her relationship with him and that Max, in particular, has a unique connection with him.
“They really liked him,” Lopez told Oprah Winfrey on Saturday while she appeared during the Los Angeles stop of the former talk show host's "2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus" tour about how her kids, now 12, felt about Rodriguez when she began dating him.
“I remember this conversation with (Max), even though it’s like three years ago now. He said something like, ‘Alex is the only one who ever doesn’t ever get mad at me,’” she recalled.
“Because Max is the one who always gets in trouble in the house,” Lopez continued. “And, he was like, ‘He’s the only one who never gets mad at me.’ He had so much patience with him because he’s all over the place and he’s the most beautiful boy and the most loving boy.
"But he will knock this over in a second! All you hear through the house is ‘Max!’ all the time. Alex had this amazing patience with him.”
Rodriguez is father to daughters, Natasha, 15, and Ella, 11, both of whom he shares with ex-wife Cynthia Scurtis.
Lopez, who had Max and Emme with ex-husband Marc Anthony, also discussed the challenges of co-parenting.
“It’s the navigation. You have to navigate it," she said. "Everybody’s different personalities. Marc has a very different life. The mother of his children have a very different life than what we have, and we all kind of fill in the blanks for each other and we give the kids all the different experiences.”
Lopez, who described herself to Winfrey as a “loving” and “really good” mom, also said she and Rodriguez each talk to their former partners about parenting in order to make things work.
“We have a network, the kids have a network of people who love, adore them and want the best for them and I think we figure it out as we go,” she said