The Day I Stopped Raising My Hand

Remember those boys at the back of the class? You know who I’m talking about. Rowdy, muttering jokes to their friends, and clearly the teacher’s least favorites. Meanwhile, the girls in the front row sat quietly and paid attention. Maybe you were one of them.

Amy Wilson certainly was. As a kid attending Catholic school in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she was smart and disciplined, a Girl Scout with older sister energy. Above all, she was a people pleaser, a habit that followed her well into adulthood and proved hard to shake off, even when she was overwhelmed. As a writer, podcast host, actor, and mom of three in New York, there was a lot to juggle, and asking for support felt impossible. That stress sparked the idea for her new memoir, Happy to Help (out Jan. 7).

In an exclusive excerpt below, Wilson recalls a tense encounter with her eighth-grade English teacher that kicked off decades of attempts to chase perfection.

“Give It All You Got”

At some point in the winter of my eighth-grade year I decided to stop raising my hand in class. I had newly sensed the resentment of some of my classmates that I was always ready with an answer. Up until then I had been rather eager to share my intelligence with the group, but now the boys in the eighth grade had taken to calling me “Brainiac,” and although everyone said boys teased you only because they liked you, this did not feel like an expression of fondness. “Brainiac” was not a name for a girl boys liked. “Brainiac” sounded like a too-smart, no-personality robot programmed without the human capability of reading the room.

The solution was obvious. I would stop raising my hand. The first class I attended as this new-and-improved me was English with Sister Benedicta, who at 67 years old seemed ancient to me. That year marked Sister Benedicta’s 40th anniversary of corralling 13-year-olds into sitting up straight and diagramming sentences. Sister Benedicta had made it her life’s work to wage war on middle schoolers’ split infinitives, although I’m not sure why; it was clear to all of us at St. Paul School in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that eighth graders were utmost in Sister Benedicta’s hierarchy of disdain.

As class president of 8 Blue, I had been determined to change that. I would get Sister Benedicta to like us. After gaining intel that it would soon be her birthday, I surreptitiously collected three dollars from each of my classmates during homeroom. I opened the phone book to choose a florist, then decided a bouquet of balloons was an even better choice. Even Sister Benedicta’s spirits would be lifted by balloons! Or so I thought, until those balloons were delivered in the middle of homeroom by someone in a gorilla costume, an added bit of flair I had definitely not specified.

No one dared laugh. Even the boys in the back row knew someone’s head was going to roll for the extreme blasphemy of inviting a gorilla into such a hallowed place of learning as 8 Blue. I found it hard to breathe. But Sister Benedicta was more bewildered than angry, her mouth a tight line as she asked just exactly whose idea this had been. When I confessed, she did not send me to the principal for immediate expulsion, but did chastise me for spending money on something so unnecessary when we could have just made a donation to the missionaries abroad in her honor. In hindsight, that did seem like something she might have enjoyed more.

The day I decided to stop raising my hand, Sister Benedicta was at the blackboard introducing the declension of the verb “to skate.” Learning English back then, at least as the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary taught it, meant accessing grammar through memorization of its many nested subcategories. Verbs could be perfect and subjunctive and indicative and imperative. Much of it was baffling to my classmates, but its orderliness spoke to me. Know the rules, and then you knew everything. Even when things became complicated.

“Who can decline this verb in the future perfect continuous tense?” Sister Benedicta asked.

It was easy. You just took the regular future continuous tense, then dropped the perfect part into the middle. I shall have been skating. You will have been skating. He or she will have been skating.

“Anyone?” Sister Benedicta said.

The hard part was not raising my hand. But I wanted my classmates to like me more than I wanted to be the one with the answer.

“Does anyone know the future perfect continuous?” My eyes darted to Diep Tran, the only other kid who might have a clue. I could tell even she had no idea.

Sister Benedicta stood at her lectern. The silence became uneasy.

“And you, Amy?” Sister Benedicta turned to me with an eyebrow raised. “Do you know the future perfect continuous, in the first person?”

“I . . . shall have been skating?” I hoped I sounded sufficiently uncertain.

Sister Benedicta nodded. “So you did know. You knew the answer.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“But you chose not to share it.”

I couldn’t tell where Sister Benedicta was going with this. Was she simply seeking clarification? I decided to stick with the basics. “Yes, Sister.”

Two red splotches suddenly graced Sister Benedicta’s cheeks. “Do you think you’re better than everyone else here?” I froze. I had opted out of raising my hand so my classmates wouldn’t think that about me. Now Sister Benedicta was drawing that conclusion on their behalf.

“Do you? Do you think you’re better than your classmates? Please. Tell us.”

Blood pounded in my ears. I was afraid to answer, and more afraid not to. “No, Sister.”

Sister Benedicta nodded, as if she had known I would say that, as if I had only confirmed her disappointment. “Then how dare you?” she asked. “How dare you withhold information that others might find useful?”

I had nothing to say in response. I was mortified that I had disappointed her, mortified also that my classmates might join her in these feelings of scorn.

From that, at least, I was spared: everyone in 8 Blue was as unsettled by Sister Benedicta’s outburst as I was. If “Brainiac” was getting yelled at, absolutely no one was safe. How dare I?

Sister Benedicta’s unanswered question hung there for the rest of the year, tacitly withdrawn but still visible, like last week’s spelling words on the chalkboard.

I’ve thought of Sister Benedicta’s anger many times in the decades since, searching for just what it was I did that made her so full of indignation. But the older I get, the less I understand it. Sometimes I think her outburst had nothing to do with me: it was just a moment of displaced frustration, of suppressed rage, exhibited by someone who had taken a lifelong vow of obedience at 18. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been one of my classmates soon enough — probably one of the boys in the back row, far more accustomed to her ire, far more able to snicker and shrug it off as soon as the bell rang.

At other times I think that it was exactly about me — that what made Sister Benedicta so angry was looking at a girl in the fast-forward stages of her adolescence who was making, for the very first time, the choice to shrink herself and become something less.

Whatever her actual motivation may have been, what Sister Benedicta corrected in me that day was the notion that I could ever slack off. I could not hang back, not even if others didn’t like it, not even if I didn’t like it.

I was obliged to share, with whomever might ask, everything I had to give.

Maybe that was the day I became the person who really doesn’t mind taking notes during meetings, the one who’s pretty sure she saved that form, the one with a safety pin somewhere in the bottom of her backpack.

Or maybe I was born destined to have a to-do list that only gets longer, never shorter, despite my constant efforts to Get It All Done once and for all. Call the pharmacy. Figure out what the kids are doing next summer. Check the portal. Prep the agenda. Listen to those voicemails. Fill out that form.

Figure out where I put that form, then fill it out.

There’s another, interior list of things I tell myself whenever I engage with my inventory of assignments: This is insane! I can’t do all of this! What was I thinking? I can’t get anything done because I am too angry at myself for having so much to do in the first place. To get out of that funk, I will further procrastinate by giving myself a pep talk, telling myself I am doing my best. That I just have to get through this next week, or season, or deadline, or developmental stage, and that things will most certainly slow down after that, because next time I will know my limits.

Next time I will know better.

Won’t I?

Amy Wilson is the author of the memoir When Did I Get Like This? and her latest book, Happy to Help. Since 2016 she has been the co-host of the Webby-honored podcast What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. Amy is also an actor who appeared on Broadway and as a series regular on TV sitcoms. She lives with her family in New York City.