Elijah Rainbow was not yet seven months old when he fell to his death from a footbridge over Brisbane’s Logan River last June, the fourth child in as many years to die in such circumstances.
Elijah’s father, David Fisher, has since been charged with murder.
His mother, Lauren Fisher has taken her grief onto the road, and can now be found travelling from town to town in her brightly-coloured rainbow van, as she tries to come to terms with what has happened.
Speaking exclusively to The Weekly, Lauren says that she and David were devoted parents not only to Elijah but to all five of their children, and she would happily welcome him home.
“I miss him,” she said. “The girls miss him,” she added, of Elijah’s four, older sisters.
Lauren isn’t allowed to talk about what happened on the day that Elijah died, but she can talk about her approach to life, and to grief.
She tells The Weekly that she was raised by evangelical Christians parents, mainly in Africa, where her father was a preacher.
She attended American boarding schools, and was “separated from my sisters by class and from my parents. There was loneliness in my childhood that I did not want for my children.”
Her own approach to parenting was very different: she has long preferred a “free-range” approach, with lots of love and guidance, but few iron-clad rules.
None of the girls go to school. There is no arbitrary bed-time. They can wear what they like, and cut their own hair.
Lauren, David and the girls had already been on the road for more than a year when she became pregnant with Elijah.
She’d given birth to all four of her girls in hospital, but given that so much else about their lives had become unconventional, she decided to at least try to “free birth” their son.
“Women have not always gone to hospital to give birth,” Lauren says, “but as women, as a society, we have forgotten that.”
The family was staying at a “rainbow gathering” near a swollen river about20 minutes from Singleton, NSW, when Lauren gave birth to Elijah on November 26, 2011, without any medical intervention.
Dearly loved, he didn’t get to live a full year.
Some of Lauren’s friends and family believe that Elijah’s death should have been a catalyst for change in her life, that she should move back into her house and put the children in school.
They want her to forget David, too. “I know some people find it hard to forgive,” she says, and she knows that some people “assume that the way we live means that we must be crazy. Therefore, what happened to Elijah must be the result of the fact that we are crazy.”
But, she says, what befell Elijah could have happened had they lived in a house.
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