Rhiannon Malone is a barrister at the Victorian Bar, working previously as a solicitor and Supreme Court judge’s associate. Speaking recently on The Lawyers Weekly Show, Ms Malone recounted arriving at the hospital to give birth and was told her son’s heart stopped beating; it was “without a doubt the worst experience I’ve ever gone through in my life”.

“And then, of course, you have to go through the trauma of still giving birth … I had walked into the hospital thinking it was going to be the happiest day of our lives,” Ms Malone said.

Ms Malone’s experience also falls within the 25 per cent of stillbirths that are left unexplained. 

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“As a legal professional, we like to reach a resolution. We like to find answers to things … in terms of closure, effectively, we don’t have closure,” she said. 

“It makes the trauma of the situation very difficult.”

She noted that professionals in law are often “type-A personalities”, being perfectionists and high achievers. For Ms Malone, she felt like a “failure as a women and as a mother”.

As she returned to work in February as originally planned after taking leave in November, Ms Malone knew that she was coming back to work in a headspace that she envisioned to be very different just months earlier.

“My head and heart, so to speak, just weren’t really there. I found it incredibly difficult to focus and to concentrate, and I was just making silly little mistakes. Things would take me 10 times as long as they normally would, and I was very conscious of the fact that we’re expected to perform. I didn’t want to cause any reputational damage.

“I had to make the difficult decision of saying, ‘Okay, I actually need to step back, and I need some more time to recover and get myself in a better head space.’ I was fortunate that I was able to do that,” she said.

While Ms Malone admits the trauma of a stillbirth might never really go away, she has found outlets that helped her ground herself as she came back into her role as a barrister.

“It really became a matter that I sort of reached a crisis point … now I see a grief counsellor every week. 

“I’ve connected with a lot of other women that have gone through this experience. And I think in being able to talk to them and knowing that all of the feelings that I have are completely normal, it just helps me to feel less isolated,” she said.

“Having other women say to me, ‘I’ve been through this as well.’ It sounds strange to say, but it was of enormous comfort.”

She also suggests that other legal professionals find support from colleagues when returning to work after experiencing a loss.

“I spoke to my clerk about the types of matters that I felt I could take on and said, ‘I can’t accept last-minute briefs’ or ‘I don’t want to be running trials’, because I just really wanted to prioritise my mental health,” she said.

Ms Malone’s mentor had let the chambers know of the tragedy in advance of her return so she could dedicate her time to her work as opposed to constantly relieving the memory in the workplace. 

“I think in him being proactive, it really protected me from having to have the same conversation 20 [or] 30 different times. 

“But equally, I’m not someone that likes to ask for help. I’m not good at asking for help,” she continued.

As Ms Malone admits that she has been a high achiever throughout her legal career of over nine years, her biggest worry about returning to work was feeling that her time off would have hindered her professionally. 

“I certainly was concerned about having six months off work and how that would be perceived, and whether or not I would fall behind, where my reader’s cohort were, if it would mean that I’d get overlooked for good work,” she said.

But, as her colleagues reminded her, “you have a really long career ahead of you at the bar. If you take six months out, it’s not the end of the world. You’ve got another 30 years of your working life.”

“In some ways, that was a hard pill to swallow because I am such a high achiever, and I really wanted to be running matters with silks, and I had all these goals of what I would achieve in my first couple of years at the bar. But I think this has been a real exercise in learning to be kind to myself as well,” she continued.

While Ms Malone has found comfort with her colleagues and other women who share her same experiences, she feels that these conversations are still treated as a distant issue. 

“I’m a tertiary educated legal professional, white middle-class woman with access to extraordinary healthcare, and it still happened to me. So I think I feel a sense of duty to normalise the conversation and not make other people feel ashamed or that this is some sort of taboo subject and that you just need to grieve in private.

“I think a lot of people that have experienced this will say that by being able to speak about our experience, it’s one of the few ways that we can parent our children that we’ve lost and to ensure that their life has some meaning. That’s why I feel compelled to raise awareness, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity,” she concluded.

Help is available via SANDS or Pink Elephants for those seeking support in pregnancy loss and via Mercy Perinatal for those seeking information or to support research into prevention of loss.

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Rhiannon Malone, click below: