Prime Time - Jane Fonda [29]
When the parting finally happened, I took my golden retriever and moved in with my daughter, Vanessa, who had a home in what was then a relatively modest part of Atlanta. It was funny, actually. As I wrote in my memoirs, I went “from twenty-three kingdom-sized properties and a private plane that could sleep six to a small guest room with no closet.” And that time was wonderful, scary but wonderful, because it felt like I was stripped down to rawness and reality, which is just where I needed to be in order to allow a truer me to emerge. It felt right that the womb of this transition was in the home of my firstborn. It was a bittersweet time, a time of beginnings and endings. Vanessa had just had her first baby, this was her first home, and yet her father, the French film director Roger Vadim, was in Paris dying of cancer. In fact, when I first moved in, she was with him in Paris, and so the silence and aloneness that surrounded me was abrupt and total. I relished it. Here I was in another fertile void. Alongside the mourning over what could have been with Ted, I could feel something happening. I was terrified, but I knew that all the work I had done on myself to try to save the marriage and my preparations for the start of my Third Act had borne fruit. These things hadn’t saved the marriage, but they had saved me. Giving birth to ourselves before we die is definitely something to work for. Around that time, I read a quote that stuck with me: “Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we cannot control and find life, waiting there for us.”
The psychologist Marion Woodman says that within “vulnerability lives the humility that allows flesh to soften into the sounds of the soul.”6 I experienced the truth of this during those aching weeks alone in Vanessa’s home. A space began to open, allowing me access to another wavelength beyond consciousness. It wasn’t something that came to me through thought. If I had to locate it somewhere, it would be in my body. I could feel myself moving back into myself, becoming whole, awakened. I sensed at the time that this was God.
Being Perfect
All my life I had believed that unless I was perfect I would not be loved. This had engendered a futile struggle, since we aren’t meant to be perfect, and it had gotten me into a lot of trouble—like silencing the parts of myself that didn’t seem good enough, and developing eating disorders. In fact, I now think it was this long-standing disease to please that had prevented me all along from being whole. Why inhabit yourself if yourself is yucky? Recently, I was excited to read in William Bridges’s The Way of Transition that in Matthew 5:48, when Jesus tells his disciples, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” there is a mistranslation of the Greek adjective teleios, which actually means “whole, fully formed, fully developed.”7 Jesus wasn’t telling his disciples to be perfect, like God; he was telling them to be whole, like God.
I am grateful that this feeling of becoming whole occurred later in life, when I could experience it consciously. Now that we’re living longer, being a late bloomer has a lot of advantages. Maybe some people are intact spirits from the beginning, and maybe it happens to others in early life. But it’s glorious to be at an age when you are aware that it’s happening, that you worked for it, and that you’re on the right path. For the first time as an adult, I was without a man in my life yet felt whole, rather than like a half a person waiting to be completed.
I was going through what Gail Sheehy in Sex and the Seasoned Woman calls the passage “from pleasing to mastery.”8 This time can be the hallmark