"I don't think there's anything more important than making peace before it's too late. And it almost always falls to the child to try to move toward the parent"
About this Quote
There’s a hard-won calm in Fonda’s phrasing, the kind that only lands when you’ve lived long enough to realize time doesn’t negotiate. “Before it’s too late” isn’t melodrama; it’s a deadline. She frames peace not as a warm feeling but as a practical act with an expiration date, turning reconciliation into something closer to emergency preparedness than romance.
The sharper edge is in the second sentence: “it almost always falls to the child.” That “falls” matters. It suggests burden, gravity, a job no one applied for. Fonda isn’t idealizing parents as wise elders or pretending family power dynamics naturally reverse; she’s naming an uncomfortable truth about emotional labor. Parents often hold the authority, the narrative, the original injury, and yet they can be the least flexible. The child - even an adult child - is the one expected to translate, forgive, initiate, and absorb. It’s a quietly political observation: responsibility doesn’t always follow fault; it follows capacity. The more emotionally literate person ends up doing the work.
Coming from Fonda, the line carries the context of a public life lived in argument - with institutions, with audiences, and famously within her own family orbit. It reads like distilled memoir without the memoir’s self-pity: a woman who’s seen that pride can masquerade as principle, and that “peace” sometimes means choosing connection over the satisfaction of being right. The intent isn’t to excuse parents; it’s to urge action anyway, while there’s still someone alive to receive it.
The sharper edge is in the second sentence: “it almost always falls to the child.” That “falls” matters. It suggests burden, gravity, a job no one applied for. Fonda isn’t idealizing parents as wise elders or pretending family power dynamics naturally reverse; she’s naming an uncomfortable truth about emotional labor. Parents often hold the authority, the narrative, the original injury, and yet they can be the least flexible. The child - even an adult child - is the one expected to translate, forgive, initiate, and absorb. It’s a quietly political observation: responsibility doesn’t always follow fault; it follows capacity. The more emotionally literate person ends up doing the work.
Coming from Fonda, the line carries the context of a public life lived in argument - with institutions, with audiences, and famously within her own family orbit. It reads like distilled memoir without the memoir’s self-pity: a woman who’s seen that pride can masquerade as principle, and that “peace” sometimes means choosing connection over the satisfaction of being right. The intent isn’t to excuse parents; it’s to urge action anyway, while there’s still someone alive to receive it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Parenting |
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