This story in the upcoming issue of Star Magazine is really quite sad. I don’t feel sorry for Vanessa Minnillo’s mom at all given the circumstances, but it just is sad the way it all turned out. Someone at Star caught up with Vanessa’s mother, who is 57 and living in a trailer park in South Carolina. Vanessa’s mom Helen hasn’t spoken to her daughter in 12 years, since Vanessa was 18. Helen hasn’t seen Vanessa since she was 9, when she dropped Vanessa and her little brother off at their dad’s house for what was supposed to be a short time and never came back. I guess we know why Vanessa doesn’t speak to her mom and didn’t invite her to the wedding.

Helen Bondoc had no idea that her gorgeous 30-year-old daughter was even getting married. And when Star spoke with her exclusively at her South Carolina mobile home 12 days after Vanessa and Nick’s July 15 wedding in the British Virgin Islands, Helen struggled with her emotions.

“Oh my goodness, she’s beautiful!” Helen, 57, told Star as she grew misty-eyed while looking at photos of Vanessa and Nick on their St. Barts honeymoon.

“She’s changed so much, though I can still see that little scar on her forehead from where she picked at her chicken pox when she was a child.

“I didn’t have a clue that Vanessa was getting married. We last spoke about 12 years ago, on the phone. I just wanted to talk to her and tell her everything straight about my life. But I still think about her all the time, and I still love her dearly…”

Helen and the kids followed her husband to Turkey when he was assigned there, but they were sent back to the U.S. in 1991 after the Gulf War broke out.

Helen’s second marriage ended soon after — and so did her relationship with Vanessa after she dropped her and her brother off at their father’s house in Charleston, S.C.

“[Helen] said, ‘Keep them for now,’ ” Vincent recalls. “But she never came back.”

Vanessa has admitted that she became “sad, confused and emotional” about being abandoned by her mom but otherwise has remained tightlipped about why they’ve never ended their estrangement.

As for Helen, she tells Star: “It would be nice to have a relationship with her now, but I don’t know how she’d feel if I called her.”

And if Vanessa and Nick had kids? “It would be a happy occasion to meet my grandchildren. Whatever she’s doing today, I hope she’s happy with this man and that he treats her well. She’s still my little girl.”

[From Radar Online]

That’s terrible! Who could do that to their kids? Vanessa’s mom also claimed to have been a “hostess” and a “waitress” at two different strip clubs so I think it’s safe to assume she worked as a stripper. I don’t blame Vanessa for not talking to her mom. It just makes my heart hurt to think of someone abandoning their kids like that, but I guess it happens all the time.

E! ran a story a couple of days ago with some pretty classy quotes from Vanessa on what she thought about the fact that her new husband’s ex wife was also getting married. She used a common expression “the elephant in the room” and E! ran it with a headline that Vanessa was calling Jessica Simpson an elephant. It wasn’t accurate by a long shot, but it was funny. Vanessa said “To address the elephant in the room, yes, you know coincidentally at the same time that our wedding is going on, his ex is actually also doing the beautiful thing of getting married herself. I think she would probably pray, as much as I do, that they allow us to have our own moments.”

It’s like Vanessa wanted to say she’d cut a bitch if she stole her wedding thunder but she restrained herself and made it about the press potentially doing that, not the ex.

Access Hollywood has a new interview with Nick where he again asserts that no reality show will be coming to follow-up on his wedding special. Meanwhile Nick told E! that he’d love to have kids and was “doing everything I can.” I really like the guy and wish the best for him and Vanessa. I doubt that Vanessa’s mom is going to be playing the doting grandmother when and if these two have kids though.

Photos are from 7/25/11 (airport, credit: Fame), 6/17/11 (Bachelorette part, credit: WENN) and 4/9/11 (drunk, credit: WENN)