by Jane Fonda
I am only at the start of my soul journey, but with my discovery of the early Christian interpretations and having found a community of feminist Christians, reverence is humming back to me.
Sometimes the open wounds left by regret can become fertile ground for the seeds of restitution. My regrets are that I wasn’t a better parent and that I have had to wait so long to feel like a whole person. People often ask me why have I chosen to work on issues of adolescent pregnancy, sexuality, and parenting. These are the issues that call to me, asking me to try to prevent young people from having to wait as long as I did to respect, honor, and be themselves.
In 2000 I went to Nigeria with staff of the International Women’s Health Coalition to make a documentary about three unique and highly successful programs for girls. Here I am squatting amid a group of schoolgirls in Lagos.
To know what needs to happen to make children resilient and healthy, and to avoid early pregnancy, I can draw on my research, travels, and interviews with parents and youths around the world. But I can also think back on what did or didn’t happen in my own and my children’s early years. The parent—especially the mother (or mother figure), especially in the formative years when the brain isn’t yet hardwired—is the critical factor. And if the mother, for whatever reason (depression, addiction, violence, abuse), can’t show up for her child, another caring, nurturing adult must be found to provide the necessary bond. Fathers, if they are warm and loving, can be crucial to a child’s resilience. The safety of a father’s loving (nonsexual) embrace can help ensure that a daughter won’t seek a man’s love in the wrong places. A son can be inoculated against the toxic effects of patriarchy if his father (or another consistent, loving male) models emotional expressiveness and caring. For girls and boys, being fatherless is less damaging than having a rigid, abusive father.
But whether we are parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, ministers, or athletic coaches, we all have a responsibility. This means, through our example, showing “perfection” to the door and helping girls respect themselves whether or not they conform to society’s current aesthetic norms; talking to them about feelings, relationships, and sexuality; and, most important, listening to and hearing them.
I have talked more about women and girls because . . . well, because I am one of the former and I used to be one of the latter. But over the last number of years I have seen how boys are affected by the same things as girls, only it manifests earlier and differently in boys. I have some very personal reasons for needing to understand boys as well as girls. I have a brother, a son, a grandson, and (more recently) a granddaughter for whom I hope one day there will be an empathetic partner to love. I know that lack of empathy is systemic in the patriarchal culture—one reason my heart goes out to men.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan has three sons and has done extensive research on the development of boys. Her research shows that whereas girls lose relationship with themselves at the start of adolescence (as I did), boys experience this loss roughly between the ages of five and seven, when they start formal schooling. This is when boys can begin to shut down and show signs of emotional stress (depression, learning disorders, speech impediments) and out-of-control behavior. Obviously not all boys experience this. It seems that warm, loving, but structured home and school environments act as vaccines against gender stereotypes.
When little boys begin to go out into the world, they internalize the message of what it takes to be a “real man.” Sometimes it comes through their father, who beats it into them: Don’t be a sissy. Or it can be a mother who won’t or can’t respect a child’s real feelings. Sometimes it comes because our culture rips boys from their mothers: Don’t be a mama’s boy. Sometimes it’s the “manhood” messages from teachers and the media. It can be a specific trauma that shuts them down, like what happened to Ted at five, when he was sent to boarding school. Think about all the men you know who are oddly divorced from their emotions. This isn’t just a question of “Boys will be boys.” It goes way beyond male/female differences in brain chemistry, and it has had an impact on all of us. Fear of being considered unmanly is so deeply ingrained that I believe a series of U.S. presidents refused to withdraw from Vietnam because they were afraid of being called soft. How many lives have been lost because leaders needed to prove they were “real men”? (And it is usually the poor who are sacrificed on the altar of our leaders’ insecure manhood.)
For their own good, and for the good of every other living thing on the planet, men should join women in leaving the Fathers’ house.
EPILOGUE
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
—MARGERY WILLIAMS,
The Velveteen Rabbit
I am, gratefully, still a work in progress. I have part of one act to go in which to practice conscious living, be there as fully as I can for my children and grandchildren, contribute in whatever ways I can to healing the planet. If I can do these things, I’ll be able to die gracefully and without regrets. We’ll see.
In three years I will be seventy—which leaves me a little more than twenty years, if I’m lucky. I’ve worked hard to get where I am, and I can tell you with utmost certainty that entering my third act the way I did made all the difference, because it has forced me—every day—to show up, to remember that this is not a rehearsal and that I have promised myself to do what was needed so I wouldn’t have regrets. Things change when you become intentional.
Bit by bit I have learned to love and respect my body. I may have betrayed my body, but my body has never betrayed me. Maybe in our Western culture you have to be a certain age for this to happen: to have lived long enough to love your hips for having enabled you to bear children, your shoulders to bear burdens, your legs to have carried you where you needed to go.
As Viola Fields in Monster-in-Law, my first film in fifteen years. It was fun.
(© MMV, NewLine Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. Photo by Melissa Moseley.)
On the set of Monster-in-Law with Paula, one of its producers.
(© MMV, NewLine Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. Photo by Melissa Moseley.)
I have known failures. Those I have run from taught me nothing. Those I got to know intimately permitted me quantum leaps forward. The failures are what deliver us to ourselves. You don’t get Real by playing it safe.
In 2004, after fifteen years in “retirement,” I made another film, Monster-in-Law. I did it for two reasons: I needed money to create endowments that will ensure the future of the adolescent reproductive health programs and services I helped start in Georgia, as well as professionals to run them. I also recognized that I am a very different woman today than I was fifteen years ago—at once lighter and heavier—and I wanted to see if this would change my acting experience. It did! Unlike fifteen years ago, I felt confident, playful. As of this writing, I haven’t seen the movie, but the process was joyful both in the acting and in the relationships with cast and crew. It didn’t hurt that my beloved friend Paula Weinstein was a producer of the movie and that it was filmed entirely in Los Angeles, where Troy could spend hours on the set watching me work and giving me great acting tips.
Vanessa has long since graduated with honors from Brown University, went on to study English and creative writing at NYU’s graduate school and then to its Tisch School of the Arts to study film. She is a fine documentary filmmaker with two advocacy documentaries under her belt—one, Fire in Our House, made with Rory Kennedy (Robert and Ethel’s youngest child), about the effectiveness of needle exchange as a harm-reduction strategy, and The Quilts of Gee�
��s Bend. A granddaughter, Viva, has arrived—as bright and beautiful as a dream. I watch in awe as Vanessa mothers Malcolm and Viva with intention, intelligence, and unconditional love. Vanessa has grown into a woman with strong values, a discerning mind, and a desire to make it better. My in-house Jiminy Cricket, she continues to teach me. When I asked her to describe what she does, she said she was “one of the spiders on the web of life, pulling threads between elements—activists, organizations, funding—to create a more cohesive and sustainable whole.” In Atlanta, she is developing a nationally replicable model of an environmental curriculum for preschoolers. She walks her talk.
Vanessa with her daughter, Viva.
Troy went to Afghanistan with Eve Ensler in 2002. He is standing in a metal box that had been riddled with bullets.
(Paulo Netto)
Lulu with retired NBA player Manute Bol and one of her Lost Boys, Valentino Achak Deng.
Troy studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and has become a fine actor, brave, with a range and style all his own. I had the surreal joy of walking down the red carpet on his arm when he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his lead role in Showtime’s powerful Soldier’s Girl. Then there was the thrill of someone walking right past me in a mall to ask him for his autograph. But beyond his creative talents, Troy is a beautiful, deep soul, a political activist who works to end youth violence, particularly our gang epidemic. When Eve Ensler asked me for a quote about how the world would be different if violence against women stopped, I said, “More men would be like my son.”
Lulu lives in Atlanta, where she established the Lost Boys Foundation, which grants scholarships to young men who fled Sudan’s civil war. She is also the director of the Atlanta Thrashers Foundation and their community development. She has grown into a confident woman with an insatiable intellectual curiosity.
Nathalie left the film business, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University as a cultural anthropologist, and lives in Maine, where she started a shelter for victims of domestic violence.
Thanks to Ted’s generosity, the five of us continue our work with our family foundation, each with our own unique focus.
Ted and I are close friends and see each other regularly. His children are thriving. Beau runs his father’s wildlife programs; Teddy owns a boatyard in Charleston, South Carolina; Rhett is a fine documentary filmmaker and photographer; Jennie raises children and horses in Virginia. They are all environmentalists and philanthropists. Laura sits on the boards of numerous environmental organizations and is a progressive force to be reckoned with. Their children call me Grandma.
Tom and his wife, the actor and singer Barbara Williams, are also friends of mine. Their five-year-old son, Liam, is Malcolm’s uncle and Troy’s brother. Families come in all configurations.
As for me, I feel myself being drawn forward along a path shaped by my new understandings of gender and of faith. I don’t know where it will lead me, but I do know that my energies will be devoted to helping make things better.
We face a shrinking, congested planet with diminishing resources and no vast, conquerable frontier to escape and expand into. Globalization may be creating one sort of unified world, but for it to be a peaceful, just, sustainable form of unity, our consciousness needs to catch up to it.
2004, in Santa Monica with Tom; his wife, actress/singer Barbara Williams; their son, Liam; me, Vanessa, Viva, and Malcolm.
The new reality demands internationalism, multilateralism, humility, and compassion. But these approaches are considered “effeminate” by the men who currently run our country. If Christ returned today, would he be labeled “effeminate” by these same people?—those disciples, that emphasis on forgiveness, that suspicious identification with women and with the poor!
There’s a lot of work ahead. But the longest, darkest night of the year—the winter solstice, my birthday—is also, in the Southern Hemisphere, the summer solstice, the longest, brightest day of the year. It all depends on your perspective.
From my perspective, what we are seeing are the final paroxysms, the flailing, dangerous death throes, of the old, no longer workable, no longer justifiable patriarchal paradigm. I believe that just beneath the surface a great tectonic shift is occurring. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone is one of the places where the earth’s crust is thinnest and where thermal activity is closest to the surface (the famous geyser Old Faithful is but the most dramatic evidence of this activity). If you walk or drive through the forests and meadows, you can see steam and puddles of hot mud bubbling up through cracks in the earth’s surface. I have witnessed the equivalent of that steam and hot mud bubbling up all around the world—in the form of women and men who are ripening the time for the bubbling to become volcanic. I am one of them.
My arms and heart are flung wide—welcoming more transformation, wherever it leads. I am filled, rich with an inheritance of memories and lessons: Not only my mother’s lovely, doomed butterflies and my father’s final silent tears. Not only my cherished blood family and chosen family and the men I’ve loved and my trusted women friends. But also Susan and Sue Sally, and Ms. Hepburn’s evocative challenge: “Don’t get soggy!” Hope smiling in the eyes of a schoolgirl in a bombed Vietnamese shelter hole, and pain brimming in the eyes of veterans. Girls in clean dresses making stationery from garbage. Every character I’ve played onscreen/onstage and every role I found myself playing in my personal life. All the trees I’ve planted and animals I’ve loved. Some pretty terrific fountains-of-Versailles-and-fireworks sex! The conversations and books—including this one—that changed my life; the lessons of pain; the healing anger that shatters silence; the courage to scrape oneself up off the floor and try again—and then again. The moments I’ve glimpsed of searing epiphany and simple grace.
2000, fishing on Ted’s Flying D ranch, Roxy at my side and Malcolm sleeping on the shore. Life is good.
(Vanessa Vadim)
Every earned line on my skin and scar on my heart—I can own them now. I can affirm every imperfection as my share of our mutual, flawed, fragile humanity.
Each story and individual, each metamorphosis—they live in me now, and celebrate being here, being useful.
Deep in my blood, brain, heart, and soul—they’ve all come back to live in me.
And, finally, so have I.
FILMOGRAPHY
2005 Monster-In-Law
1990 Stanley & Iris
1989 The Old Gringo
1987 Retour
1986 The Morning After
1985 Agnes of God
1984 The Dollmaker
1981 On Golden Pond
1981 Rollover
1980 9 to 5
1979 The Electric Horseman
1979 The China Syndrome
1978 Comes a Horseman
1978 Coming Home
1978 California Suite
1977 Julia
1977 Fun with Dick and Jane
1976 The Blue Bird
1974 Introduction to the Enemy (documentary)
1973 A Doll’s House
1973 Steelyard Blues
1972 Tout Va Bien
1972 F.T.A. (documentary)
1971 Klute
1969 They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
1968 Tre Passi nel Delirio
1968 Barbarella
1967 Barefoot in the Park
1967 Hurry Sundown
1966 La Curée
1966 Any Wednesday
1966 The Chase
1965 Cat Ballou
1964 La Ronde
1964 Les Félins
1963 Sunday in New York
1963 In the Cool of the Day
1962 The Chapman Report
1962 Walk on the Wild Side
1962 Period of Adjustment