Minka Kelly spent her childhood at the strip club rather than the playground.
The actress spoke candidly in a new interview about her “chaotic” upbringing while living with her single mother, Maureen Dumont Kelly, who worked as an exotic dancer.
“I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn’t, wishing she was like the other moms,” Minka told People Wednesday.
“I only was able to really appreciate how special she was when I got much older — in fact, when it was maybe a little too late.”
The “Friday Night Lights” star shared that she and her mom lived paycheck to paycheck in an old storage shed at an apartment complex after losing their unit.
Without money for childcare, Maureen — who died of cancer in 2008 — was often forced to bring her daughter to work at the Crazy Girls strip club in Los Angeles.
“If she made a lot of money that night, we’d go grocery shopping at 2 a.m.,” Minka recalls in her memoir, “Tell Me Everything,” which hits bookstores on May 2. “My childhood was colorful and chaotic, unstable and inconsistent, unpredictable and hard a lot of the times. But the silver lining is that it made me a very adaptable person.”
Fast-forward to when Minka was 17 and her mother suddenly skipped town after being warned of a potential drug bust.
As a result, the “Parenthood” alum went to live with her abusive high school boyfriend, Rudy, and ended up getting pregnant.
Maureen eventually made her way back home, and the mother-daughter duo went to Planned Parenthood to seek an abortion — but Minka changed her mind on the exam table.
As they drove away, her mom suggested they could raise the child together, making Minka question her last-minute decision.
“Raise this baby together, how?” she writes. “With what money? What home? What insurance? I couldn’t imagine bringing a baby into what my mother brought me into. Absolutely not.
“That was it. In that moment, I knew the right choice. Raising a child with my mother would only continue this family trauma, another cycle added to so many generations of pain. Hadn’t there been enough damage already?”
Soon after, she made her way back to the clinic.
Minka eventually moved to Hollywood, where she tried to connect with her estranged father, Rick Dufay, a former Aerosmith guitarist.
She worked as a receptionist, surgical technician and model before landing her big break on “Friday Night Lights” in 2006.
Around the same time, the actress reconciled with her mother after learning Maureen had been diagnosed with colon cancer.
Minka even moved her mom to Austin, Texas, where she filmed the NBC series.
While the “Titans” star was taking care of her dying mother, she finally got the chance to ask questions about her unusual upbringing.
“I saw her start to crumble in shame and regret and pain when she was already in so much of all of those things, and I just immediately thought, ‘I don’t need to do this to her,'” she shares.
“I only need to forgive her and love her. She’s already broken. What is the point of pouring salt on the wound? I’m fine. I just want to take care of her right now.”
Minka took care of Maureen until the matriarch’s death at age 51.
