On her podcast, Mina Starsiak Hawk said her mom and "Good Bones" costar isn't involved in her children's lives on a day-to-day basis.
Aaron Rapoport/Corbis via Getty Images
HGTV stars Mina Starsiak Hawk and her mom Karen E. Laine have become famous for fixing up homes together, and now their relationship may be in need of some repair.
On their HGTV series "Good Bones," which premiered in 2016, Hawk and Laine renovate homes in Indianapolis, Indiana, through their company Two Chicks and a Hammer.
Two Chicks and a Hammer announced in an Instagram post from 2019 that Laine was stepping back from the company, though she still appears on the series.
The show quickly became popular on the network, as did its spinoff, "Good Bones: Risky Business." However, as Hawk revealed on a pre-recorded episode of her podcast "Mina AF" in early August, the eighth season of "Good Bones" — which began airing on August 15 — will be the final one.
And in another podcast episode from Tuesday, Hawk said her relationship with her mother is more fraught than viewers may have realized.
Representatives for Hawk declined to comment on this story, and Laine and representatives for HGTV did not respond to requests for comment.
Because Hawk and Laine's operation was a family business, their other relatives started appearing on the show over the course of its run, including some of Hawk's siblings.
Hawk has five siblings, as she and Laine explained in a video for HGTV: brothers William and CR; Kelsy, a half-sister through her mother; and Tad and Jessica, half-siblings through her father's second marriage.
Hawk and her husband Stephen, who have been married since 2016, share two children together, Jack, 5, and Charlotte, 2. The pair also cared for Jessica's daughter, Julie, for some time in 2017, as People reported at the time.
Although Hawk and Laine described their family tree as "complicated" in their video for HGTV, their blended family appeared happy to HGTV viewers at home as the pair transformed their home town with a sense of love and community.
But Hawk revealed on Tuesday that things aren't as simple when the cameras are off.
On Tuesday's episode of "Mina AF," titled "The Pain Of Staying The Same," Hawk spoke about change and boundaries, opening up about how her son's recent fifth birthday party spurred her to think about how she wants to approach her relationship with certain members of her family — including Laine — moving forward.
Jack turned 5 on August 9, and as she shared on Instagram, Hawk hosted a party for him on August 12.
On her podcast, which was recorded ahead of Jack's birthday, she said she had invited her family members to her kids' birthday parties in years past, but she wasn't sure she wanted to invite them this year.
"My family is challenging, and I've been going back and forth about who do I want to be able to be present at this party?" she said. "Will it affect my kids? Will they even notice who's here and not here? There's gonna be a bunch of animals. That's all they care about. Am I being true to myself and my husband by setting appropriate boundaries for certain people to be here or not be here?"
Rachel Luna/Getty Images
She went on to say that she was unsure if she wanted to invite her mom and some of her siblings because of "the current state of affairs" of their relationships.
"My mom and I aren't in a great place," she said. "My brother Tad and I aren't in a great place. My brother William and I are kind of like nonexistent place. It's complicated without even being complicated. We don't really engage much, and the last engagement wasn't super positive. And that was maybe a year ago."
Hawk also said she wanted to prioritize inviting people to Jack's birthday party that are in his day-to-day life, which doesn't include her family.
"Not only do my mom and my two brothers not fall into that category of being involved in their life on a regular basis, we're also not on good terms," she said, adding that members of her family are typically cordial to one another and still gather for family events even if they have tension, largely because it's important to her father.
"Whenever there's an event, we all put our big kid pants on and pretend to be nice to each other and do the event, and then go back to our corners of the universe and talk shit about each other," Hawk said, adding that her family members had been able to "coexist" on a vacation together, though she didn't say when. But she went on to say that that system doesn't work for her anymore.
"I just don't want to do that," she said. "Because that doesn't feel genuine. It doesn't feel real. And it's just not what I want my life to be."
Hawk did not say whether or not she and Stephen decided to invite her mother and brothers to Jack's birthday party on the podcast episode, though the family members did not appear in any of the photos she posted from the event. In the caption of her Instagram post about the event, she gave a shout-out to the people who support Jack.
"Jack has such an amazing village," she wrote. "Thank you all for being his people!"
Hawk shared on a separate podcast episode that was recorded months ago but released on August 7 that "Good Bones" was ending after eight seasons.
"It's the end of an era," she said in the episode, titled "And That's A Wrap… Or Is It?"
Hawk said she and HGTV mutually agreed to the end series, adding that the stress of the show was becoming too much for her in part because her team was typically working on five to eight projects at the same time due to the demands of television.
And while she wanted to have a slower work pace, Hawk was concerned about how her employees would be impacted if she chose to step back, as she wouldn't need as many staff members if she was working on fewer homes at a time.
"All the things that I was putting on myself, it was making it really, really hard to function as, like, a normal human being, because I always felt the weight of so many other people's worlds that I put on my shoulders," she said. "I got to a point where I think I kind of felt like, whether it made sense or not, it felt like I was fighting for my life, or fighting for my family's life, fighting for my employees' lives, to figure something out, to find a solution, to find the next thing."
"I just became a version of myself that I really didn't like," she said.
Ultimately, Hawk said ending the series was the right choice for her husband and children.
It's unclear if Hawk will work with HGTV again in the future, though she announced over Instagram on August 4 that she is starting a position as the chief design and build officer for home-improvement brand Character Home.
Laine hasn't formally commented on "Good Bones" ending, though she did indicate she's open to more opportunities with HGTV in the comments section of an Instagram post.
Laine posted a photo of herself with Hawk on August 10 promoting the eighth season of the show, and a user commented that they were "bummed" the show was ending.
"Just because Mina says it's over for her doesn't mean the future doesn't hold something for me," Laine replied.
