Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to

A phase in life I’ll never forget is the time when my son was a toddler. It was a season of strugglesettling into a new job, with our bank balance hovering near zero, life felt relentless.
My wife and I weathered those lean days, finding solace in the small, chaotic joys of our son, who was just beginning to explore the world on wobbly legs and with garbled words. Teaching him the alphabet became a daily delight. I still have old tapes of him fumbling through numbers or inventing his own language as he learned to speakprecious relics of a simpler chaos.
Raising a child is exhausting, no doubt, but the thrill of watching him take his first step or toddle across the room unaided? That’s a feeling words can’t fully capture. Now, decades later, I find myself missing those days.
I hold onto a quiet hope that one day, as a grandparent, I might relive a piece of that fleeting magic.