No More Secrets
When the secret is told, the stronghold is broken.
—DR. RICHARD DOBBINS
That day in 2003 seemed nearly perfect. I felt myself bustling around, caught up in the pre-vacation mode of cleaning, organizing, and packing, before my husband Jonas and I left later that day on a weekend business retreat for our company. My mother calls it butzing, staying busy at an almost frenzied pace. I love butzing.
At some point the whirlwind that was me entered my study, slicing open envelopes, reading e-mails, making last-minute phone calls. During the summer of 2003, I found myself with some major decisions coming up, not the least of which involved selling the company, Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels. With our 700th domestic location just around the corner, and 119 locations in twelve foreign countries, the business barely resembled the small farmers’ market stand Jonas and I started in 1988. I also hoped to finish my first shot at a book, just something simple geared toward children, with beautiful illustrations and warm images from my childhood. Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels served as my life for the fifteen years leading up to 2003, but things seemed to be shifting. A restlessness crept into my spirit—I felt the time to move on coming just around the corner.
Even more important, though, for the first time in my life I felt completely whole. The depression I experienced off and on throughout my life began dissolving, my family recovered from many hard knocks, and I no longer depended on the affirmation of others to build up my self-esteem. I could handle conflict without breaking down. Life felt good.
Then the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Anne?” It was my personal assistant. “I’ve got an e-mail I need to show you, and you’re not going to like this.”
She told me who sent the e-mail, and immediately I knew the content. I asked her to please bring the e-mail to the house—I didn’t trust the privacy of the Internet enough for her to forward it to me. We didn’t speak long, and she made the drive from our corporate office to my house in less than ten minutes.
I watched for her car from my office window, wanting to catch her before she rang the bell or knocked on the door—I didn’t want Jonas to know she was there. He might, just in passing, ask why she stopped by the house. I would tell him, of course, but not until I could think it through, prepare myself. I paced back and forth, my stomach knotted, and when she turned into our lane, I walked outside to meet her. She handed the sheet of paper to me.
“We received this e-mail.” She knew the potential harm it could do to the business, to my reputation. “It was directed to the Web site. We’ll try to contain it. No one else has seen it.”
I retreated to my office, up the stairs, past the photos of our daughters, our grandchildren, the family picture of me with my five brothers and two sisters. Going up those steps felt like climbing a mountain. Finally in my office, I read the e-mail through tears of frustration: “Everyone thinks Auntie Anne is so perfect . . . well I know something about Anne that you don’t know . . . When everyone thought she was away . . . traveling around the world . . . affair . . .”
I cried, trying to figure out how I would ever tell Jonas about the secret I’d kept for eight years. Our marriage had survived the loss of his brother in a motorcycle accident, the loss of our daughter, the abuse of power and position by our pastor, the growth of a business: would this cost me everything? At that point I realized I could not let myself be surprised if Jonas left me. I had to prepare for the worst.
My mind couldn’t help but drift back. Just the thought of those years, from the end of 1994 up through 1996, made me shudder. That was when LaWonna told us about what happened to her as a child. I entered into major depression. Nearly lost the company. Nearly walked away from everything.
I closed my eyes. And while the anger and helplessness and sadness did not by any means vanish, I could feel something like relief welling up to fill in empty spaces. Finally this secret could no longer keep me prisoner. The truth would come out.
On a cold day in February 1995, the twenty-second to be exact, my daughter LaWonna and I drove to see my therapist. None of my family ever went along to my counseling sessions, but on that particular morning LaWonna asked me if she could accompany me and tell me something at the session.
“You can tell me now, if you want.”
“That’s okay, Mom. I’d rather wait until we’re there.”
Hmmm,I thought. Okay. Well, I always asked my daughters if they wanted to join me for counseling, so perhaps this answered my prayers. I always thought open communication and talking about our problems would help. We put on our coats and left the house.
My curiosity got the better of me, so in the car I asked her again.
“So, LaWonna, what’s this about?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you about that when we get there.”
“I know. I just thought maybe . . .”
LaWonna interrupted.
“No,” she said, smiling but firm, “I’ll tell you about it when we get there.” When she said those words, she reminded me so much of when she was just a little girl, keeping secrets.
We arrived at the rustic house that included the office. On the way inside, I couldn’t stop wondering what LaWonna would tell me. Did she have an abortion when she was younger? Please, no. I thought that would devastate me. Then I thought, No, she’s going to tell me something about drugs. Nothing I came up with in my mind could have prepared me.
We got into the office, and LaWonna and I sat across the desk from my therapist. She is a kind counselor with brown hair and brown eyes. For a few moments small talk and polite smiles made their way around the room. Then she turned to LaWonna.
“Well, LaWonna, I know that when you called me, you said there was something you’d like to tell your mother. Are you ready to tell her?”
“Yes.”
My twenty-three year-old LaWonna looked me right in the eye. While so much about her had changed in the previous twenty-three years, she still looked at me through those beautiful brown eyes.
“Mom, he did it to me too.” Her lip quivered.
Silence. Maybe I knew exactly what she meant the instant she said it, but my mind wouldn’t allow the information to process immediately. Maybe total disgust blocked my mind from traveling that road myself.
“What?”
Silence, only a second, and then it registered.
I cursed, perhaps the first obscenity I ever spoke in front of anyone. From deep down inside of me, I felt evil erupting like a volcano, and I felt victimized once again. All of my old wounds ripped open.
“LaWonna!” I yelled. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” As soon as the words entered the room, I knew they were all wrong. They hung in the air like a foul odor. I didn’t want to accuse her. I wanted to keep her safe. I wanted to go back in time and protect her, be a better mother, the kind of mother who kept closer watch over her children and didn’t let those things happen. But I couldn’t do that. I felt utterly helpless, defeated. I felt as if I were being haunted with my past, and it felt worse than my own abuse.
Something clicked in my brain. When Angie died, we mourned her death with friends and family, the people from our church showing tremendous support. But my daughter LaWonna died, too, years ago, and no one knew. Her spirit killed by the perpetrator—no one brought flowers, no one mourned.
That day came and went, one of the worst days of my life.
During the coming months, nights would slow to a standstill. I spent a lot of time wandering the house in search of peace long after everyone else fell asleep. Even when sleep finally came, it rarely took me from those troubles, only down into the frightening depths of nightmares I couldn’t figure out.
In my dream LaWonna was six months old and I felt myself being forced to bury her alive. She wasn’t dead, but someone or something forced me to put her in a casket and bury her! “I can’t do this, I can’t do this,” I sobbed. Then suddenly, in a flash, she grew older, nine or ten years old, and again I felt forced to bury her. “I can’t do this, I can’t do this.”
I woke up sweating, crying.
As 1995 progressed, I began to withdraw from my family, my friends. The business provided the perfect cover, giving me ample opportunities to travel unaccompanied, away from my house, which was saturated with chaos and conflict. I just wanted alone time, lots of it. Plus, the business made me look like a success—by the summer of 1995, we approached our 300th location and prepared for international expansion. I enjoyed the accolades I received while circulating in the business world and by choice became more and more immersed in it, drawn farther away from a home life filled with pain.
Then the deal became final: we would open our first international store in Indonesia! We never planned to expand overseas, but an Indonesian businessman persisted. Pretzels would work, he said. The product tastes too good not to work. After years and years of our turning him down because we never felt ready, he finally convinced us to give him the green light. Excitement filled the air at our corporate office. International expansion served as yet another confirmation of our success, my success, and it opened up so much potential for growth in the future. I began preparations to leave for the Far East in order to arrive in time for the grand opening of Auntie Anne’s international store number one. Privately, the thought of being alone for two weeks, literally as far away from Lancaster as I could get, filled me with a huge sense of relief.
There was something fateful about our first international location sprouting up in Indonesia. An Indonesian missionary to the United States had led me to a more Spirit-filled life way back in 1974. And now, over twenty years later, I returned to her country with pretiolas, little gifts. I smiled to myself.
Yet the smiles came few and far between, and the days leading up to my departure felt riddled with difficulty. First my daughter LaWonna, who had gotten married in 1993, let us know she’d decided to get a divorce. Then my unmarried nineteen-year-old daughter, LaVale, told us she was pregnant. My girls struggled, and I didn’t know what I could do to change the abysmal course on which all of our lives traveled.
Not only did my two daughters struggle: I found myself in a morally compromising position with a friend. We seemed closer than we should be somehow, occasionally meeting over dinner or talking on the phone. I liked the closeness, the feeling of having him to talk to. But I didn’t like how it felt at home. I didn’t like the secrecy, the excuses, the lies, but this once-innocent friendship slipped down a dark road that soon led me into an affair.
On the afternoon of July 4, 1995, just before I left for the air port, Jonas, LaWonna, LaVale, and I stood in the kitchen, crying together: LaWonna with her impending breakup, LaVale under the stress of being an expectant mother, Jonas probably wondering how things had gone so wrong, and me loaded down with guilt that I was sharing my problems with another man. The girls were moving to California on July 9 to stay with family friends—LaWonna needed to get away, and LaVale wanted to go with her. They would be gone when I returned from overseas, my world disintegrating around me. What did I have to come back to? The girls would be on the other side of the country, and my relationship with Jonas was decaying. The future held only sadness and more depression.
Somehow I ended up on the 747 in Philadelphia bound for Jakarta, Indonesia, with two layovers on the way. I couldn’t wait to leave my troubles on the ground. Unfortunately, leaving the ground didn’t prove an easy task. I sat in my business-class seat, comfortable, my eyes closed, trying to escape the world. A quick escape did not exist. We sat in the plane on the tarmac for five hours.
Eventually the plane took off, but the long delay meant I missed my connection in California and was forced to spend the night. A close friend of mine, Karen Whitley, lived in California and came up to see me at the hotel. I think I stayed in a Marriott. We went out to eat, and I couldn’t stop crying, spilling my guts about my family, my girls, the problems Jonas and I were experiencing, everything except the affair.
“You shouldn’t be traveling by yourself,” she whispered. I could tell she felt scared for me.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine,” I kept repeating.
I boarded the plane in California, this time the destination Tai Pei, but was only confronted with another delay, four more hours, also on the tarmac, this time due to poor visibility. By now I felt exhausted, drained from crying all night and weighed down by the worries I couldn’t stop thinking about. Finally the plane took off. The sixteen-hour flight from California to Tai Pei became an endless stream of tears, trips to the bathroom, anything but the sleep I so desperately needed. Even in the sky, thousands of miles from home, I could not find peace.
Because of the delay in California, I missed my flight in Tai Pei. I felt very vulnerable there, surrounded by a foreign language, a foreign culture. The color gray dominated the airport, everything so drab and unfeeling. After finally finding someone who could speak English, I prepared for the last leg of my journey, a four-hour flight. Finally I arrived in Indonesia, and the Auntie Anne’s licensees met me at the airport, placed me and my luggage in their Mercedes, and whisked me off in the direction of my hotel.
Business mode kicked in. My knack for compartmentalizing took over. Suddenly, on the outside, I acted vibrant and excited, ready for our first international opening. I became interested in other people’s lives, became passionate about the product and the business, became the person who made Auntie Anne’s so successful. I couldn’t wait to see their location and their country. I probably seemed ready to take the soft pretzel message around the world. But on the inside I crept lower and lower.
On the way to the hotel, I saw things I’d never seen before. Intense poverty across the street from the most glamorous hotels in the world. Masses of people and mopeds and cars turned a four-lane highway into an eight-lane parking lot. For nearly an hour we sat there, completely stationary in a traffic jam. I ran out of things to talk about, started to feel claustrophobic. Then we moved an inch. And another inch. Then we moved faster. Finally we saw the problem: in the middle of the highway, a donkey slowly pulled a wagon down the road. I realized I was not in America anymore.
Our driver turned down back alleys and side streets to avoid the traffic. Poverty cried out from every turn. Small shanty houses piled up against each other, overlooking the river littered with floating debris. Barefoot children covered in sludge played in the streets, dodging cars and motorcycles and horse-drawn wagons. “Lord, why have you brought me here?” I asked.
We arrived at the hotel sixty-one hours after I walked out the front door of my house in Pennsylvania. I couldn’t have felt any farther from home.
The next day I met up with a few colleagues from Auntie Anne’s who traveled to Indonesia before me to help with the training and setup of the first store. The licensees took us on a tour of the city, and we visited a few potential locations. Staying busy kept my mind off my troubles, at least for a few hours at a time. But I felt exhausted from the journey, having never crossed so many time zones, and the constant transition from scenes of affluence to scenes of poverty began wearing on me, increasing my depression. How could it be fair that God blessed me with so much yet seemed to leave these people in their misery? Besides increasing my sadness, though, the sights of cardboard houses and young children going to the bathroom in the river opened my eyes to the needs in the world. In the years to come, we would begin exploring how to channel some of Auntie Anne’s resources into helping people like the ones I saw in Indonesia.
That evening the licensees took us out for dinner, a wonderful meal but foreign to my body’s normal intake of meat and potatoes. I retreated to my suite high up in a magnificent hotel in Jakarta. The pillows sat fluffed; the linens smelled fresh. I sat by the telephone and cried, feeling so safe in that room yet so cheerless. I wanted to go out and walk the streets. In my depression I felt no fear for any harm that might come to me. I think that perhaps I wished something bad would happen, something that would give me the excuse to flee this life of grief. I called one of my Auntie Anne’s colleagues who was also in the country for this opening. A good friend of mine. Someone I could trust. I couldn’t tell this person about all of my problems, not the affair, but at least I would have someone to talk to.
“I’m feeling horrible. I can’t stop crying.”
“Can I come over?” the voice said on the other line. “Should we go out for a cup of coffee?”
Soon I met my friend (and employee) in the hotel lobby, and the two of us left in a cab for someplace close, somewhere I could talk.
“I just want to get drunk,” I said, still crying. I never drank, not even a drop of alcohol, and Auntie Anne’s company-wide ban on drinking during work trips was absolute.
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Oh yes, I do,” I said, half laughing and half crying. “I do. I just want to get away. I can’t handle life anymore.”
“Well, I don’t think you want to get drunk. But if you do, I’ll be here and won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
I had too much to drink, and my good friend helped me to my hotel, leaving me there alone. What unbelievable shame I felt when I woke up the next morning! Even now this story is one of the most embarrassing for me to tell. There I was, someone who sat on Christian boards of directors, someone people looked up to for inspiration, consuming too much alcohol on a business trip, not to mention doing it in front of an employee!
Today it’s hard for me to believe I could feel that hopeless, that I actually believed by simply drinking enough I could escape the pain. I guess the main reason I’m so disappointed in how I behaved is that I strongly believe leaders in any organization should serve as good examples and be people of integrity. During that night in Indonesia, I sank to an all-time low. I didn’t live up to my own high standards, and my failure that night filled me with even more guilt, continuing the downward spiral.
The next day’s grand opening of Auntie Anne’s provided me with a much-needed burst of positive feelings. The store buzzed, the pretzels baked to perfection and shaped just right, the many employees sampling and giving perfect customer service: I looked at the pretzels and said, “Wow! Yes! This is what Auntie Anne’s is all about!” I felt so thankful for great licensees who were willing to take the risk of selling a brand-new product, pretzels, one that didn’t even have a name in their own language.
I stood there looking at the balloons, the banners, the shop, the sampling taking place, the lines beginning to form. I couldn’t believe how far we’d come in only seven years. Within the next six months, we would open stores in the Philippines as well, with many more countries around the world beginning to express interest in selling our soft pretzels.
Back in my hotel, packing my suitcase, I felt overwhelmed with two completely different trains of thought, the first being amazement that God trusted me with this business. In spite of the horrible things I’d done in my life, the poor decisions I was making even at that time, the business continued to grow: opening an international location reminded me that the sky was the limit. If I, an ex-Amish girl, could somehow manage to lead a company through this kind of growth, anything could happen. But despair still overwhelmed me. I did not want to go home. I did not want to go back to the office. I simply wanted to run away somewhere, leave the business and the success that both inspired and suffocated me, leave my family with all of their issues, leave my husband with whom I could no longer communicate. But where? There was nowhere else for me to go. So I boarded the 747 and began the long journey back to a place that never felt less like home.
After hours and hours of flight, the plane approached Philadelphia. I found myself writing faster than I knew I could, page after scribbled page addressed to God confessing my anger, my disappointment, my hurt, my depression. As the plane descended, my insides erupted onto the page. I told God exactly how I felt. I sensed an interruption in my thoughts, a persistent thought louder than my own that said, “I will make a way for you.”
My heart resisted. “But, God, how will you do this for me?”
“I will make a way for you.”
“But, God, I’ve had enough. I’m giving up. I hate my life. I’m angry at my children for being out of control. I’m angry at Jonas for not trying hard enough to understand me. I don’t see any way out.”
“I will make a way for you.”
Leaving the plane, I held those sheets of paper tightly in my fist. I threw them into the first trash can I found, unable to bear the thought of the severe humiliation I would feel if anyone read them, if anyone had any idea to what depths I sank during those times. But for the first time in over a year, I felt the slightest breath of hope. He would make a way. I walked down the concourse, my baggage not quite so heavy.
The leaves changed color, and the holidays were just around the corner. During those autumn months of 1995, I wrote in my journal that I felt the slightest of improvements—if I measured my emotional state on a scale of 1 to 10, I went from 0 to 1. Not a huge improvement, but the beginning. A change in my daughters’ circumstances may have explained why life felt lighter: they moved from California to Texas to open their own Auntie Anne’s Soft Pretzels location, to our old home filled with so many good memories. It was a homecoming for them, and their house became a place for me to go, a place to escape to when the business or my disillusion with my own home life overwhelmed me. Friends also gathered around me during that year, providing much-needed support and care.
I remember meeting with one of those friends, my sister-in-law Verna. We talked over coffee. She was one of the few people I trusted enough to talk to about everything in my life. At that point I felt decision-making time pressing down. Would I leave my husband, my family, my business, everything I knew, for a new start?
“I know I’m a good girl, Verna. I know I am. I’ve always tried to make the right decision. But right now, I just want to walk away from everything. It’s all too much. I want to be a bad girl.”
Somehow Verna convinced me to stay, to make the right decision, but I still walked through limbo until another old friend called me with advice I will never forget.
Oliver, a missionary friend from Sweden, called me shortly after my discussion with Verna. He and I spoke only once every few years. At that point he knew nothing about what I had gone through during the earlier part of that year. When I heard his voice on the other end of the line, I smiled.
“Anne,” he said kindly, “God wants me to tell you something.”
“Oh, okay. What is it?”
“You are a good girl. God has forgiven you for everything you’ve done in the past, and he will forgive you for anything you do in the future.”
How could he have known to say that exact phrase—“you are a good girl”? I had only whispered that to my very close friend Vern.
The tide in my life, pulling me into the abyss, began to turn.
Time passed, and still I waited for God to make a way for me. On August 12, 1996, Jonas and I got on our bikes at 4:00 in the afternoon after a difficult day at the office. My brother Carl and I had waded through some tough topics, things requiring resolution. I never enjoyed those types of discussions and usually ended up responding in one of two ways: either the other person tried to control me and I became confrontational, or I lost my nerve, breaking down in tears of anxiety. Back then I was a wounded soldier, but I hid it well. How could I expect anyone else to know how fragile I felt?
When four o’clock arrived, I almost laughed out loud with relief: gliding out our driveway into a beautiful August day, heading toward my favorite kind of vacation, full of long days on my motorcycle rolling down gorgeous roads. I still felt down. I still struggled to take the right road. But in the back of my head, I began to hear a voice telling me the same thing I heard on the plane during my trip home from Indonesia.
“I will make a way for you.”
I cried a lot on our trip, sometimes communicating to Jonas my need to pull over. He saw the tears, realized something was wrong, and as our trip turned back to the north, he began to encourage me.
“Anne, why don’t we just stop and see Doc? I’m sure he could help you.”
Doc was Dr. Dobbins, a counselor and founder of EMERGE Ministries. I’d attended a counseling session with him a year or two earlier but revealed very little about my true self.
“Well, Anne,” he said to me in a kind voice after that first and only session. “I think you’re handling things just fine. I think you’re doing okay.” How I treasured those words and used them to rationalize my behavior! Doc says I’m okay, I said to myself, so I must be okay. But his diagnosis was based solely on faulty information. Later Doc told me he knew I’d hidden most of the truth about myself from him, but there seemed little he could do until I became willing to share my heart.
“I know Doc could help you. Why don’t we just swing by Akron and see him?”
Finally Jonas called, and Doc’s wife, Priscilla, answered. She would love to meet us for breakfast. Doc couldn’t make it, but she would be there. God was making a way for me.
Tears came again at breakfast with Priscilla.
“I just don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said to Priscilla.
“Oh, Anne, just set up a time to talk with Doc. He can help you. I know he can.”
I didn’t want to talk to Doc. I knew he could get the truth out of me, and fear welled up inside of me at the thought of the truth coming out. The truth about Auntie Anne, about how I felt, about my mental state.
“Anne, just call him,” Priscilla pleaded.
Finally, amid my protests, she dialed the number and held the phone up to my ear. I kept shaking my head—no—I didn’t want to talk. Doc answered.
“Hello?”
“Doc, it’s me, Anne Beiler.”
I couldn’t stop crying.
“Doc, something’s wrong with me. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stop crying. I cry all the time!”
Eventually, in spite of my strong hesitations and unwillingness, I agreed to meet Doc for a few sessions later in the month. God was making a way—I never would have called Doc had it not been for Priscilla dialing the number and holding the phone up to my ear. My healing began when I discussed my issues with him, including my past, my children, my marriage. I didn’t walk into his office one day a shattered life and leave that afternoon completely repaired; yet something about the counseling I received there started the process, piece by jagged piece.
Only one problem remained: the secret I’d confessed to God and walked away from remained unspoken.
I walked to Jonas’s office, visibly shaken, the one flimsy piece of white computer paper quivering in my hand.
“Anne, what’s wrong?” Jonas asked.
“Honey, I need to read you something.”
After I read the e-mail, I didn’t look up at him, just waited for a moment in that charged silence before speaking in a whisper: “It’s true. I had an affair.”
Jonas didn’t say anything at first. I looked at the floor, probably the reason I can’t remember the expression on his face. Of all the things he could have said, of all the accusations he could have made, the words he actually said were those I least expected.
“We have to go see Doc.”
Before we left, Jonas and I drove to our corporate office to meet with Sam Beiler. By this time he had taken over running the day-to-day operations of the company. We explained the situation to him, and he told us to do whatever we needed to do, that his number one priority would be keeping the issue private and contained. I felt extremely thankful for his understanding. While I spoke with Sam, Jonas made a few quick calls and arranged a time for us to meet with Doc that weekend, the next day in fact, so we went back to the house to finish our packing, not for a weekend of business, but for what I hoped would be a weekend that could somehow save our marriage.
LaWonna was visiting us that week, and as we left the house, she could tell something wasn’t right. She asked a few questions, and finally Jonas just said, “We’re going to see Doc and Priscilla.”
LaWonna stopped for a moment.
“What did Mom do this time?”
I have to smile now when I think back to that question.
“You know, Anne,” Doc said as we sat on his screened-in porch on that warm summer night, “this could be your last chance. Three strikes and you’re out.”
I knew he was right. I couldn’t understand why Jonas still loved me after all of my mistakes. I’d hurt him deeply—I knew I had. Yet I could also feel the same slipping into the abyss that I’d felt back in 1995 when LaWonna told me about her abuse, when the company overwhelmed me, when I found myself in the middle of an affair. Feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and depression tugged on my sleeve, telling me their road was my road.
“Jonas,” I said, “first I have to tell you how sorry I am that I did this to you. I know God has forgiven me—I only hope that you can too. But I refuse to let myself go down the path of guilt and shame again, because that will only take me back into that black hole. I’ve punished myself enough. I want to move ahead, the two of us, together.”
Jonas freed me from those worries. He assured me he wouldn’t leave. He wanted to work with me on our relationship.
“I’ve felt strongly tempted to do the same thing,” he told me later that night. “How can I blame you for having the affair I’ve nearly had many times?” He continues to amaze me.
Discussing that last secret with Jonas and Doc stirred up so many things, kind of like walking through a shallow, muddy stream. Just the thought of walking through that old stream scared me at first, but it was always there—I knew I had to cross it some day. The debris, the overturned rocks, the slimy critters dashing this way and that. But then, just when you reach the middle and everything seems as murky as it can get, the water begins carrying things downstream, washing the muck away. I crossed that river in 2003; the e-mail forced me to do that. But now I feel free from all that dirt, cleaner than ever, and ready to leave the past behind.