adjustment disorder with anxiety ...

I mentioned in an email today to my friend Margaret that I was feeling homesick, and she sent back the following helpful clinical link. I feel better now, to know that every kid going to camp and I have this in common. What it means is simply that there are times when we want to be in our own homes, our own beds, with our own families, and not in someone else's. After 3 1/2 months of travel, I guess that's normal for a pathological homebody like me.

Tomorrow, perky once more, without doubt.

"According to the taxonomy of the American Psychiatric Association, severe homesickness may be best classified as adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood (diagnostic code 309.28).^7,8 The defining feature of homesickness is recurrent cognitions that are focused on home (eg, house, loved ones, homeland, home cooking, returninghome), and the precipitating stressor is always an anticipated or actual separation from home. Therefore, it is possible to distinguish homesickness from all other kinds of anxiety disorders, mood disorders, or adjustment disorders as well as from separation distress that young people may feel when caregivers leave home (eg, for work, military service, divorce, incarceration).^9,10 Homesickness may also be comorbid with other behavioral, emotional, cognitive, and physical problems that warrant clinical attention."

It's also after 8 p.m. and I'm hungry. Lynn has made a wonderful looking lasagna which we won't eat until her daughter Sarah arrives with her husband and baby, which could be soon or in an hour or two. This is good hunger, I know. But it's still hunger.

In the meantime, there's baby Issaak to keep us amused. There are six adults in this house who now spend almost all of their time gazing and making burbling noises at a wonderful one-year old boy, who is going merrily about his business - staggering purposefully around the garden, eating moss, ripping out flowers, and entertaining the giants who watch him ceaselessly. Whatever did we talk about before he arrived? Oh yes. Cutting cheese. Better to watch babies.

10 p.m. Sarah has arrived with her husband Jean-Marie, who is Burundian, and their baby Maude, who's a pale coffee colour with a spectacular burst of brown curls at the back of her head. Myriam's husband is a Muslim from Mauritius, and as I've noted, Jessica is marrying an Australian. We must hurry up these sorts of marriages, which will bring peace to the world - a recognition that cultural and racial differences are in the end meaningless, proven by multi-coloured children who are at home everywhere.