You Are the Magic

A love letter to every mother who has forgotten herself while loving so well

“While you are busy making life magical for your children — I hope you never forget that you are magic too.”

I grew up in Kerala, on the southwestern coast of India, where the Arabian Sea meets the land in a long, luminous exhale. It was a world that came at you through all the senses at once — lotus ponds still and glassy in the early morning, anthuriums the color of a heartbeat growing wild along the edges of things, ginger plants unfurling their leaves in the wet heat, and jasmine. Always jasmine. That scent that is less a smell than a memory, that finds you before you’ve even decided to look for it.

Our home sat in the middle of all that abundance like something that had simply grown there. And at the center of the home was my mother.

She cooked from memory. Not from recipes written in a notebook or measured out in careful spoonfuls — from memory. From the knowledge that lives in a woman’s hands, in her nose, in some interior place that doesn’t have a name but every cook knows exactly where it is. Most women who have cooked long enough and loved hard enough do. It is what happens when feeding people becomes an act of devotion rather than a task. I cook that way too.

My mother gathered people around her table the way the sea gathers the shore — constantly, quietly, as though it were simply her nature. She made beauty out of everything she touched. I watched her and thought: she is simply that way.

But I am older now, and I find myself wondering — did she make some of that beauty for herself? Did the jasmine reach her the way it reached me? Was there a moment in the day, some quiet unclaimed hour, where she was not a mother or a wife or a hostess but simply a woman, breathing, present, restored?

I don’t think she did. I don’t think she had those moments. I don’t think anyone ever told her she was allowed to.

My mother was not wrong. She was extraordinary. She was love — the way she had been taught to love, the only way she knew. But I could see what the forgetting costs. I could see the shape of what is lost when a woman pours and pours and never, ever refills herself.

And so, somewhere along the way, quietly, I decided I would do it differently.

I broke that cycle.

Not as a grand declaration, but as a daily practice. A promise kept quietly, to myself, over and over again. I broke it so that Ethan would grow up watching a mother who loved him fiercely and also loved herself. Who showed him, without ever making a speech about it, that a woman’s inner life matters. That her joy is not optional. That tending yourself is not selfishness — it is how the love stays alive.

For me, the breaking of that cycle came through a garden.

I came to it later in life, the way you arrive at all the things that truly matter — not by planning, but by suddenly finding yourself in the dirt with your hands in the earth and understanding, with a certainty that has no argument, that this is where you belong. The roses came first. Then dahlias, foxgloves, daffodils in their dozens. A cutting garden that now holds more than forty-five roses and a wild, spilling abundance that I walk through every morning before the day gets loud.

That garden is my love letter to myself.

Every rose I plant is a small, deliberate act of remembering — a reminder that I am not only a cook, a writer, a mother, a maker of beautiful things for others. I am a woman who needs beauty the way she needs breath. Who is restored by early morning quiet and a bloom that opened overnight like a secret kept just for her. That daily walk through the garden, coffee in hand, the dogs weaving between the beds — that is mine. I protect it. I return to it. It returns me to myself.

So I want to ask you, gently, the question I wish someone had asked my mother: What is your garden? What is the thing that is yours and only yours — not given to anyone, not performed for anyone, not useful to anyone but you?

Maybe it is a literal garden. Maybe it is the walk you take before the house wakes up, or the music you play too loud when you are alone in the car, or the book that has been on your nightstand for three months because you only get to it in those last ten minutes before sleep takes you. Maybe it is the bath you run slowly, on purpose, just for yourself. The recipe you make that is not for a birthday or a dinner party but simply because you love it.

Whatever it is — tend it. Return to it. Protect it the way you protect everything else you love.

Because the magic your children feel when they walk into a room you are in — that warmth, that safety, that sense that the world is all right — it does not come from nothing. It comes from you. From the woman you are still, underneath and alongside all that consuming, beautiful love.

She deserves tending. She always has.

And she is, without question, the most magical thing in the room.

Happy Mother’s Day, beautiful.

With so much love,

Asha

If this letter found its way to your heart, please share it with a mother you love. And if you are reading this on a day when the forgetting feels heavier than usual — go find your garden, whatever form it takes. I’ll be in mine, thinking of you.