Free Prime Time by Jane Fonda

of assholes” attitude. This is especially true of people with addictions. If the same problems keep arising, one should consider getting help, either with individual therapy or group therapy, or with a twelve-step program.
    In our parents’ time, it was common to graduate from college and go right into a career or, for many women, into the unpaid but challenging jobs of marriage and parenthood. These days, many more—perhaps most—women are working, and for both women and men, changing careers not once but numerous times during the Second Act is not unusual. Nor is starting a career, marrying, divorcing, and reentering the workplace. Maybe Act II should be called “Churn.”
    Finances
    Act II is the optimum time to take a careful and honest look at your financial situation. Your future security may depend on your starting a savings plan now. Midlife is also the ideal time to develop a healthy lifestyle, if you haven’t done so already—it will help maximize Third Act potentials. I will discuss this in later chapters.
    The Challenge of In-Betweenness
    During the middle to latter part of the Second Act, especially between the mid-forties and the mid-fifties, many women feel they’re losing control of life and have nothing to hold on to. I certainly felt this way. I call it the challenge of in-betweenness, and it’s scary. As Marilyn Ferguson has written, “It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear.… It’s like being in between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.” How we handle our time between trapezes can determine much about how well we swing into the rest of our lives.
I THOUGHT I WAS DISAPPEARING
    In my late forties, joy seemed to be leaching out of my life. When I look at photos of myself during that period, I see a blankness on my face. It’s as if nobody was home. I watch my movies from that time —Old Gringo and Stanley & Iris, in particular—and I can tell. It felt as if I was uninhabited, going through the motions—sometimes fairly well, but with no hookup to the heart. Those were the last movies I made for a long time. I quit the movie business after them. Fifteen years later I went back, but at the time I thought I was finished with it forever. I felt so empty, so low, that it was just too painful to try to be creative. You see, the only instrument an actor has to bring a character to life is her or his own body and spirit, and if those are shut down, there’s nowhere else to turn—no violin, no canvas, no pen and paper. That’s not to say that many actors don’t continue their work despite personal meltdowns. Work may provide their only escape, or maybe it’s their only source of income. I was fortunate in that the Jane Fonda Workout business was bringing in enough money for me to be able to stop acting.
    I looked ahead and saw no future beckoning, yet I had to plow onward. I had a family, organizational responsibilities, and myriad other duties. Besides, it’s not as though I understood what was going on. What was I going to say to those who depended on me? “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m disappearing, like I’m getting all blurred around the edges”? They would have thought I was mad, and in a way I was.

    Me in 1988, as my marriage to Tom was falling apart—and so was I.
MARY ELLEN MARK
    I was sure that if the approach of menopause was to blame I’d be experiencing hot flashes and night sweats; since that hadn’t happened, I lay the blame for my sadness, confusion, and irritability on my deteriorating second marriage of seventeen years, to Tom Hayden.

    In the 1970s—Tom Hayden, our son, Troy, and me, with my daughter, Vanessa, peeking from behind.
    Despite the fact that I was researching and writing Women Coming of Age, it didn’t occur to me that what was happening, at least in part, were the effects of perimenopause, that