Counting Flowers on the Wall

By Ann Marie Ray in honor of her mother, Kathleen Cetta Ray. Birthdate: October 14, 1924

I am not often recognized as having Italian ancestors, for I resemble the German side of my family. I am though, actually more Italian then German, and to meet my mother, one would either think that I am adopted or would have to believe my Roman Roots.

My mother is a full four inches shorter than I am, and before it turned silver, her hair was that blue-black that one sees in comic strip drawings. She has a Roman profile, and she even speaks Italian. My blond hair in my youth, and my height, and my lack of any physical characteristic connecting me to the woman who gave birth to me created a rift between us sometimes, an inability to solidify the mother-daughter connection.

Beyond the physical, though, the differences between my mother and me were greater: when I came home espousing feminist philosophies and arguing with my parents, my mother suggested that anything that cause such between us couldn't be worth maintaining as a philosophy, and when I started wearing torn blue jeans and pocket T-shirts as a daily uniform, she was appalled that I didn't dress more femininely.

Pointing out tour differences is not to say that we were or are not close, but rather that our differences stand between us obvious and glaring at certain times and in certain circumstances. We are always ready to help one another out, and I was doing just that when my parents retired an d sold the house at 75 East Street that had been our family home from the beginning of their lives together and for all of my life as a child and teenager. We gathered at that house, my brothers, and our spouses, and I, to help our parents pack up a lifetime of acquisitions to move off to Florida. I was toiling away in the attic, finding treasures form my past which stimulated bittersweet memories like all of my report cards from Kindergarten through high school graduation, and the fox stole with the gripping jaws and the beady glass eyes that had been my mother's serious dress up wrap and then my play dress up wrap.

These, along with many other precious items, my mother kept in her cedar chest, her "hope chest," and it was in that aromatic treasure trove that I found the program from a Public Speaking Contest that my mother competed in as a high school senior. Dated June 23, 1942, the program announced that Kathleen Cetta, my mom, would recite from "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman. I sat back and stared at the yellowed piece of paper, for, as a teacher of Women Studies, I had taught and retaught that story of the conventional marriage, out of print for years after its initial publication in 1892. My research had shown me that The Feminist Press had revived the novel in 1973. I was astonished that my mother had recited it in 1942!

I ran down the arrow bare wood attic stairs with the program in hand to ask my mother about it. I exclaimed, in my excitement, that I could not believe that she had read it, let alone preformed it, and I wanted all of the background she could give me about her involvement with it. This discovery was to me proof that she and I weren't so different, that we had a connection that spanned the years before my birth, before her marriage to my father even, to my professional life as a college teacher. Could it be, I wondered, that my mother had been an early feminist? Had she shook the halls of her pre- World War II high school with her radicalism? Had she discovered the text in some hidden book and, long before 1973, made its post-partum depression a public issue among her listening public? I was curious and excited, and I felt connected to her in new ways.

I found Mom in the kitchen wrapping glassware in newspaper, and I asked her my questions, one after the other: "What do you remember about this contest? Where in the world did you find the text? Why did you choose this particular piece? Did you win the contest? " My mother tossed her raven hair and laughed, and father joined us and laughed too. "Oh, that was about some crazy lady counting the flowers on the wall or something...I have not idea where it came from...no, I didn't win, in fact, I barely go through the contest!" My dad joined in at that point, "Your mother though she was so smart that she could fake her way through the contest, but she ended up just embarrassing herself!" They laughed at the memory, and they went on talking about the other people named on the program, clearly enjoying their common history and my mother's bravado.

I, of course, laughed with them at their stories, and I tucked the program away, for even though I did not discover a closet feminist in my maternal lineage, nor had my mother and I been able to share our perceptions of the protagonist, I remained amazed at the coincidence of her name connected so many years before with something that had become important to me. We were no more alike politically than physically, but somehow, I feel that Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew us together in a way that I hold dear.