Bullying, Stillbirth Statistics and the Danger of Silence.

My son got in trouble at school today for fighting. I was shocked and appalled when I heard what he had done. He and two other boys had, I was told, been hitting another boy with sticks. I was angry and embarrassed that my son had engaged in this behaviour. I have always told him that "it is never OK to hit", that violence is never, under any circumstances, acceptable.

As the story unfolded, I discovered that my son was involved on the outskirts of this fight. He was not holding any sticks. One child was hitting with a stick, or a plank (that part of the story varied from my son to the school principal to the mother who saw the incident and reported it to the principal), another was throwing what I gather to have been pine cones or something similar and my son was circling around, possibly (or probably) kicking.

I know. Appalling. As I already said, I was very angry and embarrassed that my son was involved in any such thing.

What neither the school principal or the school mum knew is that my son was being teased by the other boy about his sister's death.

This boy, fairly new at the school, had just discovered that my son has a sister at school and asked him if he has any other sisters. My son answered that he has four sisters including one who died when she was still in my tummy. The boy proceeded to taunt my son about his sister being weak and diseased. A fight broke out and two other boys got involved on my son's behalf. Both of those boys have also been touched by stillbirth - one had an older brother who was stillborn and the other knew a family friend had been stillborn.

I am broken. My son, my little boy, was teased at school for his sister's death. He was taunted about it by a boy who he has to sit in class with every day. When talking didn't stop it, he hit out and was punished for it while the other boy was not. I don't know where to go from here. I don't know how to kiss him goodbye five days a week and send him into the place where that happened. I don't know how to tell him to rise above it and to not let himself stoop to the level of someone who would do such a thing. I don't know how to raise this with the school. I'm lost. Lost and broken.

The school principal was horrified and dumbstruck to discover that my son had been teased about his sister dying. She was clearly floundering in the situation; that does not, to my mind, however excuse or forgive her next statement. She suggested that my son be told that talking about his sister be something that he only does with his family and that he shouldn't talk about it at school.

The statistics of stillbirth are shocking. According to a video put out by the Stillbirth Foundation of Australia citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2006 "2952 men died from prostate cancer; 2643 adults died from breast cancer; 2091 babies were stillborn; 1648 people died from skin cancer; 795 women died from ovarian cancer; 66 babies died from SIDS." And yet there is a cone of silence surrounding stillbirth. Those of us who experience the stillbirth of a baby will also at some point most likely feel pressured to remain silent about our lost babies. There is a large community, if you know where to look, made up of fellow grieving parents. We talk together and share our grief. It is very common in these circles to hear about the silence surrounding stillbirth.

I know all too well how dangerous it is to remain silent in grief. I was younger than my son is now when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I was 12 when she died. My mother was a rather secretive person and we lived in small towns; she loathed the thought of people talking about her and her illness and was fairly strong in her desire that we not tell anyone about it. I well and truly took that to heart. I didn't talk about it to anyone. Not when she was sick, not when she was dying and not when she died. It became a habit and it took me 20 years to get over it.

As a direct result of that silence i.e. due to my reticence to talk about anything to anyone, during that 20 years I got into an abusive relationship in which I endured emotional abuse and a sexual assault. I threw my young adulthood away and got married at 19 to someone I, at the time, didn't really love but who offered me an alternative to going out into the world - or an hour away to uni - and the chance to have a family. I engaged in self loathing. I endangered my health with my eating habits and lack of activity, gaining about 40kg and making myself as physically unattractive as I could.

Eventually, through growing self-awareness and then lots of time spent walking and turning everything over in my mind, I came to terms with all of it. I picked myself back up and started to move on with my life. Sometimes the old demons still come out to play: when my ex-husband attempted to force me to have sex with him after we separated I found myself once again gripped by panic and distorted body image; when my daughter died I began to suffer again from anxiety and social phobias.

I don't want my children, or anyone else, to suffer in silence. I don't want to see them make the same mistakes I made, repeat the same behaviours I lived with for so long. I have always, ever since my son was born, dreamed of the lives they will live. I want them to be fearless and to believe that if they work hard they will achieve any goal they set for themselves. I want them to take on the world. I want them to be happy.

So, no, I will not tell my son that he mustn't talk to his friends and peers about his dead sister. I will not begin him and, by extension, my daughters as well, on the road to silence. I know that road only leads to disaster.

When Kathryn died I insisted that we, as a family, see a therapist. I said then, and I repeat now, that I didn't want my children's lives to be defined by the death of their sister.

We, and they, will always remember her. We will always talk about her. We will always include her in our family.

To anyone who is uncomfortable about that: I sincerely hope that you never, ever experience the death of a child. But if you do, I will be here to listen to every word you say about it.

And to the mother of the boy that my son and his friends fought with today, I am sincerely sorry that your son was subjected to that. I do not, have not ever and will not ever condone violence. I'm still angry and embarrassed that my son was involved in that.