A great friendship used to unite me with my eldest grandson before they left three years ago. Travel did not ruin our friendship. However, it made the boy set a distance between himself and me, which, to this day, I have not been able to decipher. I thought of two things, that he considered me responsible for their travel, meaning that, being his dad\u2019s father, I could have prevented him from traveling, but I did not. Then I contemplated that he, being a child, had given in to a new life that differed, a little or a lot, from his past. When he visited us last summer and again this summer, the distance between us was obvious. For example, he refused to go out with me without the company of a third person, his grandmother or his sister. One of the reasons I travelled to visit them was to seek to understand and abolish this distance, if possible. He returned to normal with me, eating with me, going out, playing... A week before our return, he started repeating to me: \u201ctake me with you to Lebanon\u201d. The journey did not grant me to understand the distance. However, it helped me revoke it. How long will it remain revoked?!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A great friendship used to unite me with my eldest grandson before they left three years ago. Travel did not ruin our friendship. However, it made the boy set a distance between himself and me, which, to this day, I have not been able to decipher. I thought of two things, that he considered me ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[361,2015,2012,2014,1293,447,2016],"class_list":["post-9113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-church","tag-emotional-distance","tag-family-relationships","tag-intergenerational-bonds","tag-orthodox-christian-life","tag-orthodox-church","tag-travel-experiences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}