LESSON ONE
“Motherhood is a scream”
In 2nd Period, three weeks before my eighteenth birthday, I vowed to never have a baby. The miracle of life is a beautiful thing, I admitted. I was a Baptist and had read Psalm 139 many times. The sanctity of human life resonated deep within me. My mother had married at 21; in my infinite wisdom, marrying young was an antiquated notion. Instead, I had planned to marry, become the model housewife, and nurture my hubby and our 2.5 children, all by the ripe age of 30.The word episiotomy was not on the textbook’s vocabulary list that morning. Still, years later, it is the one I remember memorizing.

LESSON TWO
“You can’t just go around ignoring the negative effects of the porn industry.”
I decided I was comfortable with my anatomy just the way it was. Other bright eyes and curious imaginations weren’t as comfortable with theirs. We spent the next weeks passing around distortions of romance in cheaply published pages. She talked about the trash men watch, how it kills libido and turns gullible idiots into sadomasochistic crazies. The girls in the class, calling ourselves women, vilified porn, hurling insults and pointed glances from our ivory towers. What we did was no better. We craved experience. We would all get it in one way or another, individually discovering the emptiness that follows. And they wonder why men and women can’t be friends.

LESSON THREE
“Just lie back and think of England.”
I felt sorry for the Victorian woman. Mommy issues, daddy issues, and most everything in between, leaving “hysteria” and opium addictions in its wake. No wonder Freud had a heyday trying to sort out the mess. How do you begin to psychoanalyze a woman who encourages her husband to elicit warm company from prostitutes? Episiotomies weren’t in common use until the year 1920. They didn’t have that excuse. The first rubber condom was invented in 1855 (a lesson on Margaret Sanger would follow shortly after this conversation). They were running out of excuses. Maybe the problem wasn’t sex. Maybe, instead, it was intimacy. I felt sorry for the Millennial woman, too.

LESSON FOUR
“Don’t marry someone unless you are first sure they are not a psychopath.”
He must have watched a lot of porn. Documented domestic violence between partners affects over 38 million women worldwide. When they ask you to write down what you’re going to be when you grow up, two weeks before you leave childhood and hometown dysfunction behind, they should really ask your friends to provide the label. Victor Frankenstein was also a psychopath. Don’t believe me? Read the novel again.

Experience is a hot commodity. It secures jobs, pleases many kinds of men, and gives you stories to tell on pilgrimages wherever you may travel. It doesn’t make you wise, but it does mean you’ve lived.

– Madison Hunt

Author’s Note: In the state of Georgia, high school seniors are exposed to many indecencies. Though not chief among these, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath remains, for a writer/future educator, one of the most beloved. Though never directly referenced beyond the work’s title, her character provides the framework through which the balance of experience and the disillusionment of life’s daily grind is contrasted. Wisdom is born from experience. But only sometimes.