Anyone remember a time you were homesick?

I mentioned this here a while ago. After I emigrated to Australia I felt very homesick and particularly at Christmas. That’s a time when you see your family and there are many traditions families follow. Christmas in Australia is very, very different and each year I feel homesick. I love living in Australia, but I’m still very British and every now and then I get very homesick and I miss my birth country. Mostly I compartmentalise any feelings of homesickness and push them aside, but sometimes they still feel very strong. After I started seeing my second husband, he took me around his childhood area and pointed out places he played, the school he went to and it made me feel very sad. I don’t think people who have never felt homesick can really understand how strong the feelings can be and it can be triggered by ridiculous things at times.

I felt homesick sometimes when I was at college (and I was only 45 minutes away, but had no car). Again when I got divorced. I missed my husband and mine’s home very much.

Then the worst one…..I moved back in with my mom because she had Alzheimer’s. This was my family home. My childhood home. The one we had lived in for 36 years. We sold it eventually to pay for her to go into a nursing home. She has been there now for 9 years. My husband and I moved out to a town an hour away. I still get homesick ALL the time.
That will forever be my “real” home.

Sleep away camp. I think I was 12 or 13 years old. Homesick is a real thing, and can hit hard. It was heavily intertwined with missing my parents.

It’s not the same for me as an adult. When I miss my former city, when I move from one place to another as an adult, it doesn’t feel the same as the homesickness I had as a child. It feels like I’m just missing the stability I had, and stressed about making new decisions. I think it’s mainly because the person who I’m with daily, my husband, is with me when we move.

I’m glad you asked this Q, my husband misses where we lived a few years ago, he really misses his friends, and I think it might be a form of homesickness.

Ah, yes—those overnight Summer camps—

Until I was 10, I often wanted to just leave. Even if I otherwise liked camp. And nights are worst. Always wanted to sleep in my own bed.
By the time I was 11, I learned to make collect calls on payphones, and I think that made things easier. As a camp counselor, even as an older teen or young adult, I found that HAVING A CAR made a difference. If you had the OPTION of going home, it was much easier on you.

My Girlfriend has a dysfunctional and possibly dangerous family but still wants to live near them and misses being in close proximity to them.

Sometimes, I think, we can be homesick for other times as well. I really miss the school-age kids in a major afterschool program in an historic part of our city where I used to be a counselor. Not only the children, but the setting, the houses, the car I had, the places I ate dinner—the fact that money wasn’t as scarce. The program still operates but the people are different and the program is much more regulated, less creative, and more chaotic.

Now that I am middle aged, I realize I am resisting moving far. Times have changed, but ties haven’t. Even so, Thomas Wolfe was right. You can never go home again.

The worst bout of homesickness I had was a summer camp that didn’t let us call home. It was my third time away, so I had always done fine at sleep away before, but not being allowed to call was something I didn’t expect.

I wound up sick with a fever and they finally called my parents and I had to beg, seriously beg crying, to talk to my parents. My dad came to pick me up and told the people in charge how awful he thought they were and no one had told us I wouldn’t be allowed to call if I wanted to. Even when I was sick they didn’t want to let me talk to my parents.

I used to go away with my grandparents for three weeks in the summer when I was very young and never felt homesick.

Add me to the summer camp homesick list. I was eleven, and off to scout camp for my first time away from my family for a week.

Camp started on Sunday; by Tuesday I was miserable and crying in my tent. Wednesday was awful. By Thursday I was having fun, and when camp was over I didn’t want to go home.

God I about went crazy with homesickness the first time I went away for college. My parents should have sent me to summer camp at some point as a kid because college was the first I’d ever been away from them for an extended period of time and I couldn’t believe how hard it was. It was exacerbated by the weirdness of my teenage years: spending a lot of time sick at home with your parents taking care of you has a way of making you a little extra attached to home and your parents. And then I got really sick at college and having nobody to take care of me or help me with anything was so hard.

I honestly think I came close to losing my mind during that time period. It was only two months but I was so sick and stressed and isolate. I remember, there was a car that parked on a road near my dorm and its plates were from my home state. I was so homesick, I liked seeing the familiar plates. I memorized that car’s license plate number and I used to whisper it to myself like a mantra. I was really messed up, lol.

I was fine at Scout summer camp until I found the cherry cake my mother had given me. During the journey it had been reduced to red pieces of cherry and yellow dust. I looked at it and thought of my mother and tears came into my eyes. I was very young. When I was sure I had composed myself I stepped out of the tent and joined in a game of football.

@Mariah My daughter went off to college last August, at a school with 8 week terms. No homesickness, lots of fun being independent and cross country from home.

While home on break in October, she was sick with what appeared to be a bad cold, but was diagnosed back at school as mononucleosis. Instead of once a week calls, she would call me everyday, and just sounded miserable. She won’t admit it, but I think she felt alone and missed being cared for. Once she was better, her whole tone and outlook improved.

I was homesick when I went camping with the Girl Scouts when I was 8 or 9.

I was homesick for a little while after they dropped me off at college.

I’ve been homesick for going on 4 years now. I left South Africa to live in Scotland. I am not sure how I will ever settle, cope or fit in. I have this horrible feeling that this is for eternity. (The feeling).

^^Can you not return to SA?