Excerpt: 'It's My Pleasure'

ByABC News via logo
April 24, 2005, 11:31 AM

April 25, 2005 — -- Maria Rodale, vice chairwoman of the publishing group Rodale Inc., has collaborated with her 23-year-old daughter, Maya, on "It's My Pleasure: A Revolutionary Plan to Free Yourself from Guilt and Create the Life You Want."

Maria Rodale, who had Maya when she was 20 years old and unwed, was miserable as the creative director of Rodale, her family's business. She came to the realization that she wanted to be a writer and took the steps to make that happen. Along the way, she and her daughter have learned to incorporate all types of pleasure into their lives by loving what they do and living life by their own rules.

You can read an excerpt from the book below.

This is a book about the power of stories to change your life.

It's about stories we know deep in our soul, but have forgotten. It's about discovering the reasons why we forgot them, and remembering them again -- and seeing them in a new way. It's about why our culture looks down on those happily ending romances and fairy tales that little girls love and women secretly crave. This book is about why we let our children watch violence on TV, yet sex is strictly forbidden. It's about our story as women -- mothers, daughters, friends, journeying together on a long, adventure-filled, and sometimes frightening path. It's the story of many women who you may or may not have heard of, but who have paved the way for all of us in revolutionary ways -- in spite of tremendous odds.

These stories have already changed our lives and continue to, so we want to share our own story with you to show you some possible paths to take. But the true magic happens when you create your own story, which this book will help you do.

What's the main story that we've forgotten? It's the story of pleasure. How we lost it. Where we can find it again. It's the story of why pleasure often makes us feel guilty, as if we don't deserve it. It's about why we truly do deserve it, why it matters, and why it's so easy for us as women to say, every day, as we are helping others, "It's my pleasure," but so hard for us to say to ourselves "It's MY pleasure." This story is about a revolution in your attitude about yourself and about pleasure. It's about taking action to create positive change in your life and in the world. And, it's about appreciating the tremendous, wonderful change that has already occurred. Finally, it's about believing that maybe we can create a happy ending after all.

How I Tripped and Stumbled Onto the Path of Pleasure -- Maria

When I was 35, I quit my job.

You have to understand how scandalous this was. I had been designated the heir of my family's publishing business by my father, who had died seven years earlier. Until my mother decided to retire, which she vehemently vowed never to do, she was in charge of the company; then it would be my "turn." I was expected to work my way up the ladder, rung by rung, proving myself to the Guys (and to the occasional Girl-Guy, which is a woman who wants to be one of the Guys) along the way (none of whom, I realized later, really wanted me to succeed). I'd been climbing persistently since I was 13, when my parents forced me to work at the company to keep me out of trouble after school (the joke was on them).

When I was 35, I developed a fibroid the size of a golf ball. I thought this was ironic since, as a woman in business, it always had irked me that men went off on any sunny day to play golf and called it work. I read a book called "Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom" by Christiane Northrup, which said that fibroids were the physical manifestation of unborn creativity stuck inside us. She hit a nerve.

My job title at the time was creative director, but there was absolutely nothing creative about it. Most of my time was spent on budgets and personality conflicts. I managed a department of 70 people who were accountable to persnickety, often small-minded "clients" who always wanted completely safe but "out-of-the-box" thinking. Of course, there's no such thing. Plus, I oversaw our direct marketing business. There is something depressing about creating a mailing piece that 97 percent of people who receive it throw in the trash (if you are successful).

At one of our management retreats, a guest speaker urged us to write our own obituaries in order to get in touch with our true desires. That night in bed, while the Guys were at the bar getting drunk, I wrote mine. It became totally clear to me that I was on the wrong path in life.

I wanted to be a writer. When I died, I wanted to have "author of..." behind my name. But all I had written to date were memos, direct mail copy, and dozens of journal entries filled with bad poetry.

So I quit. I had been married a few years before and was thinking about having more kids. I also was the parent of a 15-year-old girl who I had had "out of wedlock" when I was 20. (More on that later.) By the time I made my decision to leave my job and set my last day of work, I actually was two and one-half months pregnant.

I will never forget the horrible moment right before I was to speak to a room full of 70 people waiting to hear my farewell speech. I had run to the bathroom, saw blood, and knew I was miscarrying the baby. With toilet paper stuck between my legs, I went back into the room and gave my speech.

The first month of my "leave of absence," as my mother called it, was spent recovering from a D&C to remove the dead fetus. I bled for the whole month.

Then I tried to get in touch with my inner fibroid to figure out what it wanted to be. I decided to write a book on organic gardening, something I am very passionate about.

My grandfather, J. I. Rodale, invented organic gardening in 1942. His ideas were an integral part of my upbringing. As part of my research I decided to read what he and my father, Robert Rodale, had written. My grandfather's books were eccentric, funny, crazy, and brilliant. He got into trouble for the stuff he said, but I was shocked at how much of it was finally proven to be true. Among his insights: smoking causes cancer (he was the first one to publicly claim this at a time when doctors were featured in cigarette ads); and exercise and nutrition prevent disease (again, he was one of the first to make the claim back in the 1940s).

My father's writing was different. His books were filled with dire predictions like if we don't ride bicycles instead of cars there will be no oil left in 20 years, and we will all be doomed. Given that I was reading his book 30 years after he wrote that, and cars were bigger and more prevalent than ever, I felt kind of embarrassed for him. But his passion for change led him to do many great things for the world -- including launching the first long-term studies into organic versus modern agriculture -- so I didn't hold it against him.

It was while reading one of my father's books that I realized that most of the organic and environmental movement was using a fear-based, doomsday method to motivate people to change. If we didn't do what they said, we would all starve and strangle ourselves in our own filth. That's if we didn't blow ourselves to smithereens first. There was even a prejudice against beauty. If it was beautiful, they must have used chemicals, or it must be evil, the thinking of the time went. Ugliness and frugality were the ultimate virtues, and "simplicity" was the code word.

But real positive change seemed to be happening in the organic movement in food. Gourmet food. Alice Waters and her restaurant Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, Calif., started it in the 1970s. She made organic food taste so good that the appreciative "foodies" made it cool. Next thing you knew, all the high-end chefs were going organic, and Whole Foods markets became one of the hottest growth stocks around.