Prime Time by Jane Fonda

uncomfortable limbo can offer, in the words of the Zen priest Joan Halifax, “an opportunity to exchange the wish to control life for a willingness to engage in living.” 4 No act of will can make this happen. We must have the courage to just be, to not feel pressure to set big goals but to let the grounding we used to find in people’s praise for our work now come from within us. We may feel we are broken when, in fact, we are being broken open. For women in midlife, the void is fertile because we are becoming midwives to our new selves.
    In fact, the fertile void may be an optimum time to do a life review—when you can feel that change is happening, and when parents and even grandparents may still be living and available to be interviewed. Such a review may help you heal from the challenges you experienced in childhood. As William Bridges, who specializes in understanding transitions, wrote, “The past isn’t like a landscape or a vase of flowers that is just there. It is more like the raw material awaiting a builder.” 5 Maybe, by doing a life review, you will build a ladder out of the void, the way I did a decade later … when I was sixty, not fifty.
    A Rite of Passage to Act III
    Painful though this in-between time might be, it can also be a rite of passage into the Third Act. Then all you need do is stay mentally and physically healthy and put up the sails. If our sails are up, in time the wind will come and take us where we will go, where we are meant to be.
    I hadn’t quite finished hoisting my sails when my third husband, Ted Turner, Captain America himself, sailed boisterously into the harbor. Those who knew him were sure my sails would be luffing forever in his wake, but he needed me and wasn’t afraid to show it, and this gave me confidence. Besides, I wasn’t ready yet to do life solo. I wanted and needed to try again to be a whole person within the context of a marriage, and we were well suited for each other on many levels. I wanted it to work with him so much that I did what I had not done previously: I went into therapy.

    Ted, my stepdaughter Nathalie Vadim, me, and Vanessa in 1991 at our wedding.
BARBARA PYLE

    With Ted in 1997.
    We separated after ten years of marriage, when I was sixty-two. It had taken me eight years to grudgingly realize that I would not be able to be healthy and authentic within the confines of that marriage, and then two more years after that to get the courage to say so. Oddly enough, it was the preparation for my sixtieth birthday and the confidence that this brought me that exposed the extent to which I needed to renegotiate the terms of our marriage. Those two post-sixty years were difficult, and I felt myself sinking into numbness. Unlike the malaise I had experienced more than a decade earlier, in my second marriage, this was not a matter of my hormones; this was a matter of my humanity. I saw that as I entered my last act, I’d have less time to squander. Fish or cut bait.
    It was terrifying. I had abandoned my professional career ten years earlier, and at sixty-two I knew it was unlikely, given Hollywood’s proclivity for young flesh, that I could reclaim it—nor was I interested, just then, in doing so. But who would I be now, and in the years ahead? I had been married—to one man or another—for most of my adult life, and had drawn my identity from men. The very thought of going it alone had always filled me with profound dread.
    I vividly remember the moment I realized the marriage to Ted was not going to work. I stood before him and I knew I had a choice: I could opt for safety or try for integrity. I thought of Virginia Woolf, who wrote about the angel in her house, the hovering Victorian angel who would whisper into her ear as she wrote the lines so inspirational to future feminists, words to the effect of “Tsk tsk, Virginia, nice women would never say that.” On my right shoulder I heard an angel whisper with great certainty, “Oh, come on, Fonda,