With 18 siblings to keep track of, it would be hard for anyone to stay in touch with every member of their family on a regular basis, and now that Joy-Anna Duggar has a family of her own, it sounds like she’s facing that problem. While appearing on sister Jinger Duggar‘s The Jinger & Jeremy Podcast this week, Joy-Anna admitted that it’s “hard” to stay connected to her family, especially compared to the way she once did.
Joy opened up about keeping in touch with her siblings.
During her chat with Jinger and her husband, Jeremy Vuolo, Joy answered questions that fans had sent in, and one of them was all about where her relationships with her family stand today. Now that she has her own family – including three children under the age of 8, whom she homeschools – it seems there is way less time for her to get together with her siblings, especially because she said she lives about 35 minutes from everyone.
“It’s definitely hard to keep up with all the siblings because … if we had one sibling over [for] a week, it would take 19 weeks to get through everybody. That’s a lot of time that goes by,” she said.
She added that about every six months, she’ll have one of her siblings and their family over, but there’s not much time for many other plans.
She ‘naturally connects’ more easily with some of her siblings than other.
“Whether we go to church together, we’ll see them or whatever, and then some of us, I’m just really close to a couple of the sisters-in-law, so we see each other quite a bit [and] working out together,” she said on the podcast. “It is harder to stay connected to everybody, but I feel like we all have a good expectation for everybody. We don’t feel pressure, like, ‘We have to do this together’ or, ‘I haven’t talked to this person this week.'”
Ultimately, her own nuclear family comes first. Joy added, “I have my own family to take care of, and so it’s hard to balance how much do I reach out [and] how much do I not. I want to spend time with all of the siblings.”
In recent years, she and Jinger have only gotten closer.
Joy and Jinger have become good friends as they’ve gotten older, and now, they’re getting to spend plenty of time together because Joy is temporarily living in California while her husband, Austin Forsyth, is working on a project near Jinger’s home base.
“We have gotten so much closer than we ever have, and I think some of this is just life that happens, and even though we live further away than we did in our same bedroom … it’s different because when you walk through life and you’re in the same season of life, there is a sweetness and there are also trials,” Jinger said on the podcast. “You walk through the same trials and growing up in the same family, there are things that you are experiencing that you can talk about with your sister.
“As we’ve gotten older, the age gap has closed,” Joy, who is four years younger than Jinger, agreed, adding that they really started connecting once they both began having kids.
Joy has also created a support system outside of her family.
Not seeing her siblings as often as she once did doesn’t mean Joy is lonely, though – she’s made plenty of friends who never shared her last name.
“We do have our church family and a lot of close friends now,” she said on the podcast. “Now that we’ve grown our community over the last few years, we don’t see the family as much as we used to just ‘cause we’re busy and then we try and safeguard a few days just for us a week.”
