The Invisible Architects of Our Lives
Today, as I sit gathering these lines for my godmother’s 90th birthday tribute, I find myself grappling with the weight of words. How do you capture a
lifetime of love, sacrifice, and unyielding loyalty in a few pages? How do you pay homage to an amazing Aunt who, without realising it, became the blueprint for how I’d learn to love, endure, forgive, and carry others through storms?
This is my humble, straight-from-the-heart attempt, a love letter of sorts to all my aunts, especially my godmother. The quietly formidable matriarchs of my extended Malayalee family, who taught me what it means to love without limits.
The Emotional Wealth of Aunts
I am a child of the ’70s, raised in urban India before smartphones, OTT platforms, and virtual friend circles. Back then, families weren’t isolated nuclear units. They were sprawling, gloriously entangled systems of connection. At the heart of them stood women we kids called Badi Aunty, Elsy Aunty, Shimla Aunty, Sister Aunty, and Annie Aunty. The unofficial council of fierce, loyal, endlessly tender women who raised us as their own.
As a child, you rarely recognise the wealth of such a legacy. It’s only with adulthood, especially in today’s world of barely-there friendships and scattered families, that I’ve come to realise how rare, and how precious, that upbringing was.
A 2020 study by the University of Notre Dame confirmed that children raised by multiple caring adults develop better emotional regulation, empathy, and resilience.
I didn’t need research to know this. I lived it. I learned from my aunts how to resolve conflicts without distance, how to hold people through their worst days, and how to turn up even when it’s inconvenient.
The Unspoken Sisterhood
More than anyone, I witnessed this in the bond between my mother and her sisters. Their relationship wasn’t always scripted in sugary sweetness, it was many times forged in shared struggle and hard-earned laughter. There were illnesses. Financial strains. The quiet heartbreaks life hands to women who are asked to hold everything together. Through it all, they remained.
What made them remarkable wasn’t just their resilience. It was their instinctive understanding that love could be blunt, fierce, corrective but it was always loyal. I remember watching them sit together, always communicating, speaking a private language of raised eyebrows, unfinished sentences, and knowing smiles.
Why This Still Matters
In an age of rising conversations about mental health, loneliness, and disconnection, we often forget the invisible labour of women who kept families stitched together. Psychologists call this the “village effect” a term popularized by Susan Pinker, which highlights how tight-knit social circles contribute to lower chronic illness risks, better emotional health, and higher resilience.
Our village wasn’t metaphorical. It was literal. My mother’s sisters made up mine.
Even today, the love I share with my mother feels “indestructible” because it was tempered by women who held us both through life’s hardest seasons. I owe my ability to navigate loss, setbacks, and joy alike to my mom and my aunts.
The Godmother Who Mothered Us All
Among them, one woman stands tallest in my memory, my godmother, Annie Aunty. To me as the youngest of the cousins, she was the axis around which my childhood spun.
Summer holidays were not spent in resorts but sprawled across her home, a heady mix of cousins piled onto mattresses, TinTin comic books, Mills&Boons novels, unlimited Roohafza and tandoori roti & south indian curry dinners. Aunty would leave for work in the mornings while cousins lazed around the house, but never without a conspiratorial wink and a smile just for me, the youngest of the lot. “There’s something in the pantry after lunch… one slice for you, don’t forget,” she’d whisper.
In a house full of older, louder children, it wasn’t about the special dish. It was about being seen.
The Legacy of Small Gestures
She made sure I was never left behind. If older cousins went out on errands or impromptu outings, she’d insist I be taken along. Not because I’d be helpful, though she’d pretend it was for that, but because she understood inclusion’s quiet power. What followed was little me eventually making strong bonds with all my cousin sisters with each passing year. My little world of women whose lives till date continue to inspire and guide me.
Those small, enduring acts by Annie Aunty shaped my little voice and my place in the world. They taught me that love hides in everyday gestures: in second servings of chicken slid onto plates, in quiet scoldings for troubling my mother, and in the same question we heard as soon as we entered aunty’s place “Have you eaten? Are you hungry”
Love Isn’t Always Gentle
As a teenager, there were also times when I would have muttered something sharp at the dinner table to my mother in my usual teenage tone and would get a immediate reprimand right there and then by Aunty. She would meet my gaze across the dining table, calm but firm. “You don’t speak to your mother like that,” she said. “There’s a time and place to disagree. This is not it. ”
It stung but later, it opened a conversation with my mother about respect, about not letting momentary heat scorch bonds forged in care. It was the kind of love that wasn’t indulgent but was profoundly protective.
A Single Flower, A Lifetime’s Lesson
Perhaps the moment that I cherish and remember the most is when as a young college student I had landed at my aunt’s place on a weekend only to have missed my cousins. They had just left for a movie with their friends. It was one of those rare occasions where we both had the house just to ourselves. I chit chatted with aunty and casually remarked on the craftsmanship of a new floral display in the living room. The flowers seemed exquisitely crafted made out of simple napkin tissues. Without missing a beat, she pulled the carnation flower from the vase and said, “Why don’t we make one, since we have all this free time?” That afternoon, we sat fashioning petals together with some coloured paper napkins. I was clumsy. She was, as always, so patient and enthusiastic about my amateur efforts.. By late evening, I had crafted a modest imitation. It wasn’t perfect but it was mine. She told me the more I practised the better I would get at making it. Her words stayed with
me and I returned home to practice making that particular carnation flower for weeks. I got so good that a few years later, when my elder brother married, I confidently handmade hundreds of white carnations and handled the full responsibility of the church decoration. The bouquet of white carnations placed on each church pew grabbed quite a few eyeballs. I received much praise for the floral bouquets of individually handcrafted carnations. That teaching moment resonates with me even today. Now at my place of business, Ancy’s Sugar Art Academy, Sugar floral sprays on
Wedding Cakes are one of my signature bestsellers. It would be safe to say that crafting sugar flowers has become my “Therapy time.”
Because of Them, I Can
“Strong women aren’t born,” the old quote goes. “They’re raised by strong women, mothers, aunts, grandmothers who carried the weight of their world and still left room for tenderness.”
Today, I belong to a lineage of women who taught me resilience, humor, tenderness, and strength. Not through lectures but through lived example. Through gestures so small you might miss them if you weren’t paying attention.
I owe them everything. Especially my Godmother. If I can be even half the woman Annie Aunty is, as loyal, as brave, as quietly tender, I’ll consider my life well-lived.
A Birthday, A Blessing, A Benediction
So, here’s to my darling Godmother. To the woman who taught me that you can love with both a fierce heart and firm hands. That you can build your family not just with blood but with loyalty too. That you can carry entire households, hold space for others, and still leave room for a child’s special piece of dessert.
She is, and will always be, for me “The Best Aunt On The Planet”. Not because she wears that title lightly, but because she carries it like both armour and a banner, and through her, I’ve learned that greatness often hides in the ordinary and that the most radical, resilient thing a woman can do is to quietly, consistently, love.
Happy 90th Birthday, Dearest Annie Aunty. God bless you with health and smiles all around.
About the author:
Ancy James is a former television producer who, after a fulfilling 17-year career, chose to step away from the relentless pursuit of output and certainty in favour of retiring from corporate life at age 37, to a slower and more intentional life. In what she calls her act of quiet rebellion, her toddler’s health scare ensured she followed through on this decision and she traded deadlines and huge pay packets for meaningful quiet personal life. Now over 10 years later, She truly believes that our identity isn’t something we need to keep proving. It’s something we shape daily with the decisions we take for our loved ones. She now keeps herself busy as an internationally trained Cake Artist and Chef Trainer with a culinary diploma and runs a FSSAI approved business “Ancy’s Sugar Art Academy, in Bengaluru, India. She discovered marathon running in her journey to reversing her bone health diagnosis at age 42. When she is not customising cakes or running, she is busy reading books across the spectrum or spending hours pouring her heart out in these personal weekly memoirs. She shares raw, honest reflections on grief, resilience, motherhood, midlife reinvention, and the quiet beauty found in overlooked corners of everyday life. At 48, Ancy writes not to impress, but to connect, believing that vulnerability is the birthplace of both healing and growth. In a fast and AI driven world she believes her memoirs are her attempt to stay real and relevant as a female writer who is just embarking on her journey of “Becoming”.