Tell Me Everything: A Memoir

by Minka Kelly

In her way, Mom was trying to protect me, and for a long time I let her think she had.

I now know that a kid’s calibration for what’s normal is determined by whatever she grows up with.

Being with Mom could be great sometimes, the way she injected playfulness into everything we did.

Often, I thought I had the best mom in the world. Other times, though, I wanted something more normal, whatever that meant.

By this time, Mom had been a showgirl in Vegas and a part-time model. She’d dreamed of being an actor but had little success other than the occasional callback where the producer just wanted to stare at her tits.

She’d already had three abortions. She didn’t want to have another one.

a few months into her pregnancy, her mother died abruptly from a brain aneurysm, leaving Mom pregnant and alone, with no source of income.

Something in her shattered with her mother’s death. Sometimes, I’d see glimpses of the bright-eyed, spunky young woman she used to be and wonder where she’d gone. I never found a sufficient answer.

Over the years, though, Rick kept in touch with Mom. He called about once a year, and when he did, she asked if I wanted to talk to him. I always said no. As far as I was concerned, I had my dad in David. As complicated as David was, he was there for us. Plus, I was offended that Rick thought he could just call whenever he felt like it after leaving us.

This was a time when other kids my age were playing sports, learning an instrument, picking up a new language, engaging their brain in the world around them in order to determine what moved or inspired them. Looking back, I wish she’d encouraged my education and growth as a human rather than use me to keep her company when she had nothing to do.

How does a nine-year-old learn to parent herself when those in her life are unable to do so? She figures it out, one way or another, because what choice does she have? Kids are resilient and imaginative, coming up with ways to make sense of what’s happening around them; that’s the upside. Alas, it’s taken me years to realize there’s a downside, too. The harmful lessons sometimes picked up in the process of practicing that resiliency can take a lifetime to exorcise.

I later learned that during that time, she drove a car across the border for David, transporting drugs. She got caught and went to jail for a short period of time, but she never told me. Someone else, years later, filled me in. I learned more about my mother through strangers than I did from her.

She knew she wasn’t the best mother on the planet and tried to make up for it with an overflow of attention.

this was the start of my need to use the attention and affection of boys and men to confirm my worth. Miguel Quintana was my gateway drug.

Even though we want to follow a different path than our parents, and in real time we think we are doing just that, we see later that we were, in fact, following in their footsteps the whole time.

This was how it worked. Women sacrificed everything, their children, their friends, to keep their boyfriends. I basically did the same to Angel.

He let me leave and I didn’t tell anyone. This was how I’d been trained. You do whatever it takes to keep men from hurting you and then you shut up and suck up whatever shame is left behind.

Over the years it became abundantly clear how ubiquitous this situation is when it comes to sexual assault. You dressed alluringly? You were asking for it. You willingly kissed him? Asking for it. Make your money by taking off your clothes? Asking for it. Add in any whiff of sex work, and it’s all over. The answer again and again: The woman is always asking for it. This attitude is so ingrained and deeply offensive, but I didn’t know it at the time. I had so much to learn.

If I stayed in Albuquerque, this would be my life, stretching off into the distance, forever and ever, amen. There had to be more out there for me. I needed to get out.

Many of us put off dealing with our negative childhood programming until well into our forties and fifties. These issues come politely knocking at our door in our twenties, then rap louder in our thirties. If you delay looking at your programming until your forties, you are likely to have the message delivered with sledgehammer blows.

Rick, in asking me to move, had also taught me, though his way was less compassionate, a more tough-love approach.

While I preferred working with the many kinds of surgeries we saw at California Hospital, the pay wasn’t great. If I was determined to be self-supporting, and to have a schedule that didn’t require me to be on call 24/7, I’d have an easier time of it at the outpatient center, so that’s where I went.

“sensitive people change the world, and the rest don’t give a damn.”

When someone betrays your trust that deeply, there’s no going back.

“There’s a ticking clock now for you to sort things out. There’s a lot you two went through together and you’re going to need to work out your resentment with her before she dies. Otherwise, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

The cancer gave me permission to let go of all the resentments I’d been holding on to. For the first time, I really leaned into the affection she’d long offered me and that I had sometimes taught myself to resist. No matter what I did, I felt myself swaddled in her love.

she disagreed. “That’s not a mother’s love. A mother doesn’t choose a man or drugs or partying or anything else before her child. That is not love.”

“You need to tell her all the ways she hurt you before she dies,”

Once she developed cancer, she stopped pretending that everything in her life was fine and started taking responsibility for her choices. And with that shift, together we found the space we’d needed for healing.

My disbelief over her passing lasted years. I kept feeling the urge to call her and would have to remind myself that I couldn’t. I’d kept a voice mail of her that I listened to over and over again. What was extra heartbreaking was that that voice mail was from when she’d wanted me to come and visit her at Thanksgiving when I didn’t.

I miss my mother all the time, not that she ever made my life any easier—but I would definitely love and appreciate the joy she used to bring. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that finding someone who emits such pure and unabashed joy like my mom did is really hard to come by.

many women, especially women of color and specifically Black and Native women or transwomen, have to work twice, three, ten times as hard as white cis women and still don’t receive the same assistance or opportunities. Women have never enjoyed the fruits of equality or equity in the history of humankind and it continues to shape the paths available to us.

I’ve come to realize I have an exceedingly high tolerance for pain, emotional and otherwise.

always and consistently invest in your friendships with humililty, love, and intention.

Men will come and they will go, but it is the women in your lives who’ll always be there.

It’s very difficult to talk your way into healing.

Your pendulum has swung so far to one side that you’re not living as Minka. You’re living as the girl trying to prove she’s not her mother.”