The Real Housewives of the Twin Cities

Who are the brave women that encompass local mom culture?

By Nina Afremov, Jemma Keleher, and Carly Quast

We’ve heard all about the real housewives of Beverly Hills and Miami, but who are the housewives that make up the backbone of the Twin Cities? With each purchase from Rae Dunn, Total Wine, or Hearth & Hand, these mothers bravely carry our economy on their backs. In addition to having good taste, they pave the way for women everywhere with their fearless expression of opinion both in real life at countless retail stores and virtually on their mommy blogs. 

While hundreds of moms applied to be one of The Wake’s Most Influential Housewives of 2021, three stood out for their brazen grit and overall heroism. The following mothers were chosen as glittering examples of what moms everywhere should (and do) aspire to be. 

Alexandra Atkinson

By: Madison Kuehn

Alexandra Atkinson entered her twenties as a bright eyed pre-med student ready to take the world of medicine by storm but left them on the arm of big-shot lawyer Brian Atkinson, who prefers she doesn’t work to avoid the stress wrinkles a career can cause. Brian inherited his father’s law firm and advocates exclusively for white-collar criminals. “People like them, like us, don’t belong in prison,” Atkinson explained. 

When I arrived at her luxe penthouse in downtown Minneapolis, she stopped me at the door. “You can leave those outside,” she said, looking disdainfully at my knockoff Doc Martens. “Or maybe just throw them away.” 

She was dressed head to toe in Chanel as though she had attended a runway show before our interview. In reality, she had come from a meeting with her daughter Anastasia’s principal regarding reports of bullying. “It’s not bullying if she’s right,” Atkinson explained. “That girl was asking for it. She showed up to school in Crocs.”

As a mother of one, Atkinson’s pride and joy is her daughter. “She’s not spoiled,” she said. “She’s loved.” While Anastasia begs for a puppy to keep her company while her parents discuss their loveless marriage, Atkinson refuses, saying that dogs are “gross.”

“Regarding your article, I don’t adore the term housewife,” she said. “I prefer She-E-O of the home.” She went on to explain that while she doesn’t cook or clean, she does take on the motherly duty of attending PTA meetings at Anastasia's Catholic school. “We’re not religious. I just don’t trust the public education system to choose worthy peers for my child,” she said. “My daughter learns alongside only the best and brightest.” Judging from the tuition rate, she also only learns among the wealthiest. 

When asked about her PTA duties, Atkinson scoffed. “I just go to keep the school from going to shambles. If those frumpy, smiling, sweater-donning moms had their way, our yearly fundraiser would be a carnival,” she said, and then paused for a moment before saying with a scrunched nose, “outside.”

“If no one was there to tell them their jeans are ugly, they’d spiral. They’d still be shopping at Maurices if I hadn’t stepped in,” she said. “They need me.”

Karen Smith

With a short brown bob, maroon tracksuit, and pair of water-stained Uggs, Karen Smith is ready to bring her suburban neighborhood back to where it belongs—next to a Starbucks. 

“I just don’t understand,” she said, standing in her driveway as her twin boys chased a soccer ball. “We have all of these ‘specialty’ and ‘independently owned’ coffee shops. Is it so much to ask for a chain?” 

By: Madison Kuehn

Smith lives in Andover, a suburb neighboring Coon Rapids and Anoka, which each have four Starbucks in their city limits. It would take ten minutes for Smith to reach the nearest Starbucks, but ten minutes is a minute too long. 

“If it was eight minutes? Sure. If it was nine minutes? Fine. But ten minutes?” Smith said, rolling her eyes. “That’s ridiculous! I live in the suburbs. It should be easier than—” Before finishing her sentence, Smith began yelling at a jogger wearing a black hoodie who was passing by her home. She explained that the jogger had scared her and wondered if she should inform the police of their appearance. “No Starbucks and I swear this neighborhood is getting more dangerous every week. I really don’t know why I live here,” she said.

Smith has attended every city council meeting this year, and she has no intention of stopping if the new year doesn’t bring a Starbucks Coffee to her neighborhood. At the most recent meeting, she stood in front of the Andover city government for 35 minutes, chanting about Frappuccinos and cake pops, before returning to her seat. 

“The Starbucks lady,” Ted Butler, an Andover city council member, said after the meeting. “Yeah, we know her.” Butler denied any confirmation of a Starbucks being built in Andover. “No,” he said, “we’re not building it.”  

“All I can hope is that they come to their senses,” Smith said later that day as her husband pulled into the driveway in a new Mercedes-Benz. “Well, as long as they accept my coupons. Because if they don’t, I’d go somewhere else.”

Hazel Green

Motherhood guides Hazel Green in every aspect of her life. During our interview in her communal-living home in South Minneapolis, which she shares with four other moms embracing an alternative, homeschooled, organic, gluten free, coconut water lifestyle, she shared her insights from her experience being a doula and a full-time mother to two-year-old son Solaris.

By: Madison Kuehn

“If there’s one thing I have learned,” she began, stirring honey that she had harvested into her dandelion root tea, “all the wisdom I need to guide my little earthling child, he gives me. If he wants to stay up into the late hours of the night crying, I feel his pain and I howl with him. If he wants to explore the world like toddlers do, he is allowed and I join in sometimes. Yesterday he was exploring our vegetable garden in the backyard and I followed his lead as we experienced the taste of dirt together. My little human brings me back down to earth.”  She bent down from the hip and rustled Solaris’s hair as he sat at the legs of her chair, playing with her dusty bare feet. 

Hazel was anything but short of words about her career as a doula. “In a way, having helped so many strong women give birth in their own homes without invasive Western medicine, it feels like I’m a mother to all the children I’ve brought into the world,” she told me, tears brimming in her eyes. “What I love most about what I do is that I help women gain autonomy over their own bodies. They can choose how they give birth and I help them create the perfect environment to do so. But as soon as a mom-to-be asks for an epidural, I pack up my things and leave. That is literally poison to the body and I’m not in the business of baby murder. They can go to Planned Parenthood for that if they want.” 

Hazel was kind enough to spill the intimate details about giving birth to her own child. “I gave birth to him in a yurt that I spent my whole pregnancy building on the outskirts of Duluth. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into it, just like when I delivered Solaris. Such a meaningful experience.” All in all, it was certainly eye-opening to spend the afternoon talking with Hazel, a woman who supports other women, but only according to her own terms and conditions. 

The people mentioned in this article are fictional, and all quotes were written by the authors.