Spring semester ended May 6th. I spent about a week here in Bloomington trying to work out my summer schedule (I signed up for chemistry research at the school), then I went home sometime around may 17th. I stayed with my family until around may 25th when I was supposed to go on a weekend hiking expidition with a friend from college (I got bronchitis the day before and couldn’t go though). Went back home around June 2nd. Stayed at home with family until July 8th.
Its starting to hit me that that is the longest amount of time (roughly 2 months) I will probably spend with my entire family (both parents, both brothers, brothers wife, niece, dog, bird) for the rest of my life, excluding the afterlife if it exists. My younger brother (who is home this summer) is moving to San Diego to start his math program in fall. My older brother, his wife and daughter still live in the hometown but may be moving in a year or so to north carolina. I will be busy next summer with an internship, and the summer after that I will hopefully be gainfully employed.
Its just bothersome in a way. I’m 26 but now I guess I’m seeing that things are truly different now. I have lived with family my whole life. From 0-23 I lived with my parents, from the ages of 23-25 I lived with my brother. Now I’m living alone and will soon start living with a friend from college come august. I lived alone last summer and it didn’t bother me much but I guess now I realize things are truly changed. Maybe I’m a late bloomer on this stuff.
So does anyone else have stories similiar to this one?
Forgot to add. My chemistry research thing starts tomorrow, thats why I came back on July 8th.
I usually get like this after I have to come back to Bloomington after a stint at home. I got the same way after I spent a month at home during christmas break. That period was better in a way since we have a big icestorm and all the power went out. So we pretty much had to talk to each other since there was no electricity. That was nice in retrospect. Me so corny.
My homesickness tale is a little different from yours. Exactly three weeks after graduating from high school, at age 17, I woke up in a large room 1500 miles from home with 82 strangers, my clothes and personal possessions were taken away from me, my head was shaved and I was not allowed to leave the building, much less the State. It was a fun little summer camp program the U.S Navy called Boot Camp. During my first 3 weeks, I wrote 63 letters home to family and friends. It tapered off quite a bit after that as I got more comfortable with the drill (heh!). I really enjoyed going back home after 9 weeks, but it (I) was not the same. Over my 6 year enlistment, I spent about 4 months back in my hometown. It was always fun to get back together with my friends, but our lives were moving in different directions, we had different frames of reference, we had become different people. I was never really homesick again after that first month of boot, I guess because I had developed a separate identity apart from my hometown and now I was “home”, wherever I happened to be.
I suspect your experience will be similar. Once you find a new place and start to fit in, that will be “home” to you.
I’ve been away from my hometown for about 2.5 years now. I think its just the realization that we are all grown up now and that that is the end of me living with family which i’ve done for the first 25 years. I’m going to live here, my younger brother is moving to california, my first niece was born only 7 months ago and my older brother (the father) and his wife may move in a year or two.
Its not the first time i’ve felt homesick. When I first moved to Bloomington I got homesick and when I come back after a long vacation I still get homesick. I guess over the years I’ll create my own home somewhere.
The only cure for homesickness in Bloomington: Nick’s English Hut, followed by a visit to Big Red.
(I spent 2 homesick years in B-ton, looking desperately for northwest beer and trying to avoid feeling humid)
I have a kind of existential, long-term homesickness. I was born and grew up in southeast Alaska, so anything less then rainforesty and incredibly steeply mountained feels bleak and empty to me. The plains freak me out. Then I spent the rest of my childhood in Hawaii, which is also utterly different from the mainland, so I feel nostalgic for everything associated with that, too. When I get more than 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean I lose my bearings and feel like this patch of dirt we call north America goes on. . . forever, in a vaguely disconcerting way. I remember driving over the continental divide for the first time to the east and being on a high ridge in Wyoming and looking east downhill and realizing that that nothingness continued for a very very long distance.
So not so much homesick for family, but missing these places I will never live again and possibly never visit again.
My home doesn’t exist anymore. My mother was my home: whether she lived in the big house she brought my sister and I up, in or the garden apartment she lived in for 30 years. Debbi and I always knew we had a refuge if we were broke or in trouble or just lonely. We would vacation together around the world, Mom and I, Debbi and Mom, the three of us, using Mom home as our base and refuge, A lot of the family antiques and childhood furniture and toys and books are always scattered comfortably about.
But now Mom is fading away in an assisted-living facility, and my visits consist of helping her in and out of her wheelchair and to the bathroom and dressing and undressing her and trying to cheer her up in a situation that lends itself to no cheering up, becaue it is not ever going to get any better, it’s just a steadly slide into complete incompetence and dependence.
Homesickness? I look at the piles of books on her shelf she’ll never be able to read again. The photos and tchotckas from our worldwide trips; trips we’ll never be able to take again and which she can barely remember: it takes me five minutes to carefully maneuver her into the bathroom; how can we think about trooping through the Scottish highlands?
That’s homesickness for me: not for a “home,” but for a “person.”
Oh, on a lighter note, one year in Belgium with no decent Mexican food, after living in So. Cal. We couldn’t even find pinto beans for sale. One store had the “homesick American” aisle, with root beer, baked beans in the can, sasparilla, grits, peanut butter, etc, but no refried beans. Also had to travel far and wide for a good-quality pub-style hamburger (not fast food, not steak tartar).
Now, however, I really really miss doner kebab.
I tend not to suffer form homesickness a great deal. It only hits me hard when I see home (might be the Australian coastline from 35 000ft if I’ve been overseas, or it might just be my street if I’ve been outta town) but then I’m home, so it’s a positive thing.
I went to college 100 miles from my hometown, never felt any homesickness about that.
I was 19 when I went to study in Israel, though. Yup, ten thousand miles from home. Eventually I found the English language used bookstore, figured out how to get around on the bus, learned how to use shekels without mentally converting everything to dollars, and even found Mexican food!
When I was twenty-three, I moved to Michigan. I’d never been there, I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have a job waiting for me. I found the weather baffling, had no weather appropriate clothing when it started getting really cold.
After three years in the Midwest, I’m okay. In fact, I have to go to California next month for a wedding, and instead of getting excited about going home, I’m annoyed that I have to spend more money on my airfare than I’d wanted.
While this doesn’t compete with other tales of woe, I’m currently stuck on a sparsely-populated South Dakota Indian reservation for my summer job, don’t have a car, and everything including a grocery store is at least 10 miles or more from the non-air conditioned shack where I live. To top it off, two other workmates live with me and while I don’t get a chance to see or talk to one of them that much, the other one is a pretentious, effeminate git who reminds me of a non-funny version of Niles Crane from “Frasier.”
I’m stuck here for another month until I fly back to D.C., where even with the stifling humidity, there are at least stores open on the weekend and there aren’t wild packs of kids and dogs shooting off fireworks at all hours of the night. In another week or so I think the Tribe is going to have a traditional Indian burial for my social life. Appropriately enough, it died quietly in the night.
What you’re describing isn’t really homesickness. It’s more like “Sadness at the passing of an era.” Isn’t there a German word for that?
I high school I had a crew of friends and aquaintences, and we used to go to a little mexican place a lot. I can remember sitting with the usual suspects on the last day of regular classes, and thinking, “well, this is it.” The last time we would ever participate in our familiar routine.
