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I’ve learned something about silence: it’s noisier than I thought.

Every day for the past few months, I’ve awakened in the chilly pre-dawn and listened to that deafening silence.  It’s that quiet time before the dog patters in, barking, the cat meows his demand for breakfast and I feel my seven-year-old daughter hurl herself on the bed, chattering about that day’s play dates, homework, and brown bag lunches. These are the daily sounds of my family’s expectations of me—that I will satisfy their appetites and solve their problems. 

But through the din of their sounds and expectations, the silence I am talking about falls upon me like a cloud.  I am being suffocated—paralyzed almost—by the clattering within my head, turning over and over the same questions about who I was, who I am and where the hell am I going now. 

Why is it that after a successful marriage, career and the joy of motherhood that I’m no longer sure of exactly who I am?  Am I the cook? The housekeeper? The babysitter? Or sex kitten when my husband comes home from work? 

For weeks, I’ve been suffering and choking back the sobs while lying in bed every morning while my family sleeps, trying to untangle the mystery of me during the few, precious minutes I have to myself each day.  Eventually, I throw back the covers, give my daughter a kiss, swat the cat off the bed and feed the pets but by mid-morning, I feel that still small voice grow to a deafening decibel, drowning out and replacing the confident woman I once was, with someone who is unfamiliar and new.

I disappeared. My family didn’t even notice. There were no crying jags, no signs of depression, no absences from school meetings or dinner parties. Breakfast was served, lunch was still packed and dinner was on the table every night.

Except this was not my plan. This was not the way it was supposed to be, as the voice inside my head repeatedly reminded me.  

I felt like a complete failure.  It wasn’t always that way. 

I left my anchor job at CNN in January 2007, full of hope and a lot of bravado.  I had plans. Big ones. A major talent agency in Beverly Hills had flirted with me about a book idea I had pitched months before.  I also started to meet with investors and high level business people to develop a social network for cancer patients and families in honor of my late husband, Will who had died in 2003, two weeks after our daughter, Chloe was born. 

In hindsight, I saw Will’s death as my first “failure.”  I failed to cure his cancer and I paid the ultimate price.  My grief was at times paralyzing, but the institutions around me were my scaffolding to build a new life.

First, there was CNN and the supportive executives, producers and writers. Then there was the former Stanford Research Institute where I became Entrepreneur-In-Residence, a coveted position that made me an official member of Silicon Valley’s start-up elite.

But then, the economy unraveled. Investors ran, my start up never got off the ground.  Carol the CNN Anchor, retired.  Carol the Entrepreneur, unemployed.  

As I lay in bed every morning, I felt as though I was drowning in regret. I disappointed my investors. I disappointed my family. I wasted two years. 

And if I am not Carol, the ________, who am I?   

As it turns out, the past two years have been about healing, not building.  

I confused the two.   

I thought building things like my career, my family, my business and my homes were signs that I was healing from losing Will.  In fact, they were the very things that helped me avoid healing in a sustainable, meaningful and abundant way. 

You see, I failed to mention a major event in-between leaving a successful career to launch another:  I fell in love. And I re-married.  His name is Mike and he’s my best friend, lover, mentor and devoted father figure to Chloe.  And, no, I never thought I would ever, ever love again.  But I do.

And in my silent morning ritual, I wondered if Mike wished he had married “Carol Lin, CNN Anchor.”  I no longer felt that I, alone, was enough.  For him.  For anybody. 

It took several weeks of this silent turbulence before I finally confessed all this to him.  I felt such relief.  At first, the words came out slowly. 

“Mike, have you ever wished you knew me when I was actually ‘someone’?” He looked confused.  “What do you mean?”  And then my words came tumbling out. Who am I really? Why did I fail? What am I supposed to do now?

The choices in our little beachside community seem to be Tennis Mom, Yoga Mom, Massage-Therapist-In-Training Mom. 

Then, Mike’s eyes softened. We were lying in our big, soft bed.   Mike reached out and pulled me toward him until my head rested on his chest.  He wrapped his big arms around me until I felt safe enough to cry.

“Carol, you can do anything you want. And if what you really want is to be a mother, then you’ve earned that right.” 

Huh? A Mom without the Tennis/Yoga/Part-Time Job label attached.

Mike saw what I was afraid to see; that loving someone wholly with all my heart is something I wanted and needed to do but that I was afraid to admit it was “enough.”  I’ve never been in relationship with someone without the distractions of work that always, sometimes conveniently, took me away from my personal relationships. 

Mike saw how Chloe longed for me to pick her up at school, not the au pair. He didn’t dismiss her little pleas for my presence as clinginess. He saw Chloe’s need to understand what it now means to be a family of three with a new man in the house. Who was going to teach her?  Who was going to help Chloe answer all her questions about this new family and what it meant to her memory of her biological dad, Will?  It wasn’t accurate or fair to Chloe for me to continue to say she was “too young” to understand.

Chloe needed my help to build a bridge from our past; to mourn and celebrate her father so she could embrace her new father, Mike and all he had to offer and wanted desperately to give our little family.

Perhaps these were the very questions I wanted to avoid. Carol the Entrepreneur was too busy to consider that Chloe needed Carol, the Mom, at least during this transition.

Mike knew I loved the thrill of risk-taking—pursuing a television career, starting a company.  But the risk of loving someone with all my heart had it’s own, potentially painful risk:  I could lose him, too. 

Perhaps it was time I took a new risk, in a new role, that will teach me that being remembered as someone who loved truly and loved well, is the most rewarding life that will, even in quiet times, speak volumes.

Former CNN anchor, Carol Lin is the mother of one daughter and the co-founder of TulaHealth.  She is a regular ShareWIK.com contributor.  Visit her on the web at CarolLinReporting.com.

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