The Mom Weekly Volume 114: October 14, 2025
You can read this, or any other previous Mom Weeklies, by going to the home page here.
The Privilege of a Large Family
This past week, as most of you know, I was in Baltimore for the Jane Austen Society of North America Annual General Meeting (better known as the JASNA-AGM). It was a wonderful event and trip and I’m still recovering from the week. But a conversation there helped solidify some thoughts I’ve had in recent weeks.
The Sunday morning of each JASNA AGM begins with a Jane Austen themed “Fun Run/Walk.” For a conference that had nearly 1,000 attendees, I was surprised that only 14 showed up for the run—about half were runners and half walkers. But that made it a very convivial group and a fun early morning time.
(Digression: one of the runners was Friday night’s speaker, Susannah Harker. She played Jane Bennet in the 1995 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, and if you’ve seen that adaptation, she is EXACTLY as you would imagine her. An absolutely lovely person in every way. She was a runner, and I was a walker, so we didn’t get a chance to visit until we sat together at the SAME TABLE at breakfast later that morning. One of the people at her table called me over when I was fruitlessly looking for a seat).
Since about half of us were walking, I was able to drift in and out of several conversations. At one point, I was talking with a woman about something medical and I mentioned that one of my sisters is a doctor (and somehow had mentioned I’m one of six). She said, “Do you have any lawyers?” To which I responded, “hahaha, you have no idea!” And then she said, “Do you have any finance people?” And I said, “Well, my son is an accountant, and I do financial writing, and there’s an actuary among the cousins.” And then she said, “Well, you’ve got everything covered. It must be nice.”
It must be nice. Yes, it is nice! Through the rest of that morning a phrase kept popping up to me: we experience the privilege of a large family.
The word “privilege” has become loaded and even fraught in our current culture. There’s the saying, “Check your privilege” when discussing certain topics. I could write a lot about why I don’t find “check your privilege” a particularly useful construct because you never know what someone has gone through, either for good or ill, and may not have as much privilege or as little privilege as you suspect. Appearances can be deceiving.
But … There is a privilege to being part of a large family. It’s not just because in our family, some of us are medical professionals, and others are lawyers and a judge, and some are money nerds, and others are artists and thinkers and extraordinary people. All those things are well and good. But they don’t “cover everything,” as my fellow walker thought.
The connection and the love that we share are the real privilege.
Yes, we have a person to call or text when we have a medical issue, or a legal issue, and I in particular LOVE to help people with money questions. But that’s not the real privilege.
It’s not that we don’t annoy or irk each other (understatement) or disagree strongly about issues, or have the same outlook on things. I, for instance, have zero interest in sports, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage among our sports-loving family. But I know I still belong!
I invite you over the next few days to consider what a privilege you have in being part of a large family. I invite you to experience gratitude for our large family, and rest in that gratitude to help you get through the inevitable bumps and annoyances that come along with a lot of people interacting.
Remember how much I love you (and our large family!),
Mom
Interesting/Notable:
What It’s Really Like to Support a Family on a Modest Income (gift article)
This piece is lovely, and beautiful. We can make a way to have the life and the family we want. Finances shouldn’t be the main consideration about this.
How to ADHD: Declutter—Clutterbug YouTube Channel
I thought this was a very helpful video about how to declutter large amounts of items, and also how to arrange an apartment or home in a way that serves the people living there and their style. In this case, lots of open storage—which can be great for ADHD. And I love the reveal. It’s worth watching in the background while you are doing something else.