Jane Fonda, who at 85 has accomplished so much in her life, still feels unfulfilled in one aspect amid all her successes: her parenting.
Fonda is mother to three fully grown children, Vanessa Vadim, Troy Garity, and her only adopted kid, Mary Williams.
While talking with Chris Wallace on CNN, she joked that she was looking forward to dying, saying, “it’s an adventure”.
“I don’t want to go; I still have a lot to do,” she clarified. “If I discovered that I had cancer again, and there was nothing that I could do, I’d be okay with it.
“What I’m really scared of is getting to the end of life with a lot of regrets, when there’s no time to do anything about it,” she continued, adding, “It’s one reason why I’m trying to get it all done before I come to the end.”
Wallace was taken back a little, surprised that someone of Fonda’s reputation had many regrets in her life at all.
“[I have] very few regrets,” she responded. “[But] I was not the kind of mother that I wish that I had been to my children. I have great, great children. Talented. Smart. I just didn’t know how to do it.”
Jane continued to explain how she learned a lot about proper parenting through her organization, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, which she founded after her children were already grown.
“I have an organization in Georgia that deals with adolescents and I’ve studied parenting. I know what it’s supposed to be now,” she explained. “I didn’t know then. So I’m trying to show up now.”
This isn’t the first time Jane has opened up about her concerns within her own parenting. In 2017, in an interview for Net-A-Porter with Captain Marvel star, Brie Larson, she talked about her regrets in life.
“I regret that I wasn’t a better parent,” she told Larson. “I didn’t know how to do it. But you can learn, so I studied how to be a parent. It’s never too late. I am trying to make up for what I didn’t know before.
“When I die, I want my family to be around me,” she added. “I want them to love me and I have to earn that. I’m still working at it.”
Sources:
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/jane-fonda-regrets-type-mom-3-kids-im-97354612
