Geraldine Cox

Pictured: Dorothy Cox and Geraldine Cox

Geraldine Cox’s love of travel and human rights began while working in the Department of Foreign Affairs, and she is the only Australian to have been granted Cambodian citizenship by royal decree. Geraldine is the first to admit that her mum used to view her as wayward and a troublemaker. Her life as the founder of Sunrise Cambodia – a home for children – and her official honour as a Member of the Order in Australia in 2000 are achievements her mum never would have predicted.

Mum had a little girl – Leonie – and she died in a tragic accident when the safety pin on the ribbon on her dummy was put in her mouth the wrong way around and she choked on it. My mother never, ever recovered from this loss.

She tortured herself by saying that she had murdered her daughter and she had a serious nervous breakdown before I was born, so the doctor told Dad that the only thing that might shake her out of it was to have another child.

Then I was born.

Mum went off the deep end straight away, because when I was born I looked the image of Leonie and she thought that Leonie had come back to punish her. Much later in her life she used to joke that there was a bit of truth in that. She’d had shock treatment before I was born and she had shock treatment regularly, right up until the last year of her life when she was ninety-five. The shock treatment really seemed to work with my mother. She would enter a depressed state where she couldn’t function very well and got no joy out of life at all, and then she would go on a course of shock treatment and she’d be fine.

I was the fourth daughter of a milkman in the suburbs of Adelaide. Mum was basically a homemaker. Dad was a Victorian type of man who didn’t show any affection – we never doubted that we were loved, he just couldn’t show it. It flowed through to my mother too, but her love was evident in other things that she did for us – making our clothes, cooking beautiful food. It was a safe and secure home life.

Mum didn’t have a big education and neither did my father, so they weren’t the sort of people you could sit around and talk with for hours.

It didn’t help that I was a really difficult teenager. I was wilful, I didn’t obey anything – just very difficult to handle.

When I was about fifteen I’d go to bed, kiss Mum and Dad goodnight and wait until they’d gone to sleep. Then, at ten o’clock, I would sneak out and catch a taxi and go and meet whoever was the man of the moment. I had a very high sex drive.

Around that age, I was going out with a Yugoslav refugee from the Red Cross camp and I thought he was the most exotic thing on two legs. He had an accent and a walk, European suits – he was just completely irresistible. He was twenty-one and he had no idea that I was underage, and he didn’t understand the laws of Australia – as far as that was concerned, anyway.

I was so enamoured with him, I would take days off work and ask girlfriends to ring up the office and pretend to be my mother saying: ‘Oh, it’s Mrs Cox here – Geraldine’s got a migraine she won’t be in today.’ To cover myself, I used to tell Mum that we were not allowed to receive personal phone calls at work.

I would spend all day with this man and come home for tea in the evening. They must have smelt a rat because one day, Mum did call – she said it was an emergency and asked to be put through. It might have been an emergency for all I knew – maybe the house caught fire, I don’t know – but she rang up and they said: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, but you rang earlier today to say Geraldine won’t be in.’

Mum was furious. When I came home she would not stop raving about it: ‘We know what you have been doing, you wait till your father comes home and I will tell him all about it.’

She was just bluffing, but I didn’t know that. I said: ‘I don’t care what you do – I love him, I will marry him,’ and she said: ‘Marry who?’ Then it all came out. I was pretty much barred from that relationship after that – I had to really, really go to great lengths to see him, but it wasn’t a relationship that was ever going to end well.

Mum found it repugnant that her fifteen-year-old was having sex in those days – and so did my father. They were ashamed of me. I was of the opinion, even without knowing much about the world, that what I was doing was natural and healthy and it wasn’t hurting anybody. I have always had a healthy regard for sex as a pleasure that we are all entitled to have. But Mum didn’t share that opinion back then.

Mum was lucky to get a kiss on the cheek from Dad for Mother’s Day and Christmas, and I never saw them hold hands or hug or do anything affectionate – ever. Dad was not a philanderer or anything like that – I’m sure he treated Mum with the utmost respect. I just think they both had a low sex drive and that it was a part of their life that didn’t really affect them very much. Mum was convinced that the purpose of sex was just to have children, and she even believed that once you had sex you conceived straight away – she was not very sexually aware. That was how I was brought up and my two sisters weren’t too impressed with me either – they were both virgins when they got married. None of my family could understand why I thought so much of sex.

When I was in my early twenties I met a Greek man who was one of the loves of my life. Mum was in the local grocery shop one day and a neighbour said to Mum: ‘Oh Dot, you must be so upset that Geraldine is going out with that Greek!’ Mum put her potatoes and onions in her bag and turned around and said: ‘I don’t know, if it is good enough for the Queen of England, it is good enough for our Geraldine.’

She didn’t really feel that way but she was never going to let the neighbours know that that she didn’t approve. She was loyal to us – even when she disagreed.

We were going to get married. He sent me off for tests to see if I could have children because we’d had a pretty open love affair – we never used condoms. Sure enough it was proven that I couldn’t conceive.

When he dumped me, it had a really bad effect. I decided to join the Department of Foreign Affairs because I thought: ‘Well, if I can’t be a wife and mother, I’ll live a life of glamour. I’ll travel and swan around in a black cocktail dress and get seduced by James Bond-type men.’

That wasn’t exactly how it turned out.

I never really confided in Mum. When I was going into hospital to have these tests to see if I could have children, I was pretty distressed about the results but I never told her how bad it made me feel. She would have said something like: ‘Well, that’s what happens to girls who have sex,’ and she made me feel like it was a just punishment – that I deserved it in some way. Her attitude didn’t particularly hurt me because I didn’t believe it – but it did make me realise I could not talk to her about everything I felt or did.

Any time I brought a new suitable boy home she would say, after the third date: ‘Oh, do you think you could marry him?’ I would have only met him three times but she was hoping for me to get married and settle down so that she could stop worrying.

Dad died of lung cancer when he was sixty-nine after a long stint in the nursing home. Mum couldn’t handle his deteriorating health – he was incontinent and the whole house just smelled.

It was taking its toll on Mum too – she was actually having a nervous breakdown at the time that he died. There she was in the psychiatric clinic having electric shocks and Dad was dying a slow and horrible death in the nursing home, without her.

It was a great sadness for me – I felt torn between my mum and dad – and then when he did die, she wasn’t in a position to really understand what had happened. We took her to the funeral because the doctor said that it was really important for her to see her husband in an open casket so she could accept that he was gone. Shortly after all that, I had to go to Iran on a posting with the embassy. I couldn’t be there to spend time with her when she needed me.

I took long service leave not long after because I could tell she was not right after Dad’s passing. She had a little unit in town and I stayed there with her. One day she said to me: ‘Don’t wake me up in the morning; I want to sleep in. Don’t wake me up.’

So that night she took a whole bottle of scotch and sleeping pills together – and she wasn’t a drinker. She had written a note to apologise to everybody and tried to kill herself in the night.

Of course, I didn’t know this was happening at the time. A girlfriend rang me on the home number while I was trying to enjoy the sleep-in myself, and the phone kept on ringing and ringing and ringing. I thought: ‘Fudge, Mum – pick up the bloody phone.’ But it just kept ringing.

Eventually, I went to the phone in her bedroom and I could see she was breathing in a very laboured way, and drooling too, and there was the note and the bottle – everything was all on the bed. There was no doubt that she was trying to kill herself, so I dropped the phone like a mad woman and I ran naked into the next-door neighbour’s house just saying: ‘Help, help, help – I don’t know how to call an ambulance,’ because I didn’t. I’d been living overseas for so long that I couldn’t remember. The poor fellow next door was sitting down with his family and two kids at the table for breakfast when this mad, naked woman they hadn’t even met yet came racing in.

They called an ambulance, which came very quickly. Mum was in intensive care for about six weeks, and because it was a suicide attempt she had to have more psychiatric treatment, too.

I wasn’t angry at all. She was getting no joy out of life – she didn’t want to eat anything, she didn’t watch anything. I did kind of understand why she was pushed to it and I never blamed her or criticised her for what she did. I knew it wasn’t my fault. She was just so unhappy.

I didn’t know it at the time but, in retrospect, I saw it as an opportunity to show my mother that I really did love her. With everything being how it was when I was younger, I didn’t come to that realisation until much later in my life. Losing Leonie had been such a massive thing for her. My attitude used to be: ‘Lots of families lose somebody, so get over this,’ and I was a bit impatient with her for not being able to resolve the grief.

I saw her as someone who was led by whatever happened to her in life. She was not able to rise up and overcome any difficulties – she just gave into them. It made me pity her for not being able to be the master of her own life. She was the victim of whatever circumstance was to befall her.

Later in my life, I told a story in my own book about when I adopted my daughter Lisa, who was mentally and physically challenged. I was so affected by this that when I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, I thought about killing both her and myself together. For one night, I felt myself weaken and I planned to take her with me. I didn’t think, at the time, that I was doing what my mother did – it never occurred to me. I bought us matching nighties, I got a bottle of French champagne, I had my hair done and had full make-up on, all because I thought I wanted to look gorgeous when they found me in the morning. I had it all planned. I was about to give Lisa the sleeping pills and I was going to take the second lot for myself once I knew she was asleep. But then she looked up at me. I struggled to make eye contact with her in those days – her eyes were always going around all over the place. She was very autistic and she couldn’t really understand that eye contact was a form of communication. So, for the first time, I had this eye communication with her for about two seconds and she looked at me with what I perceived to be a look of love and trust. I burst into tears and I thought: ‘Well, I have the right to take my own life but not hers – no matter what.’ Motherhood is a huge responsibility.

I was thirty-two years old and Lisa was seven at that time. I’d adopted her because I couldn’t have my own children but her illness was beyond what I could cope with. I found a place in Adelaide where she could go into care – the most difficult day I’ve ever had was the day I had to relinquish her.

I still have pain when I think about it. She had the most beautiful long, curly hair down to her waist – it was my pride and joy. But the authorities she was going to stay with said that they couldn’t possibly handle her hair and they told me that I had to cut it. I remember washing it and then having to cut it off. I put it in a silver box that I still have today in the house and I pack with me wherever I go. Although Lisa hadn’t died, in many ways I felt as though I’d lost her, so that was when I started to understand a bit better about what Mum went through when her own little daughter was taken away from her.

I will be always grateful to my sister, Sandra, because she did everything to help my mother when I was working overseas. She had her garage converted into a sweet little granny flat and the whole family – her two children and her husband – were terribly open and loving and they just included Mum in their daily life when I couldn’t be there.

Mum lived with them when she came out of the hospital and she started to be more sociable – a big change from all those years with Dad. She even met a man, Jack, when she was seventy-six – she was madly in love and they got married. She had this whole second go at life, which was amazing because when she married my father, life was certainly not all romance.

I loved him as much as I did my own dad – and he was wonderful to my mother. They would go to fancy dress balls, go jazz dancing twice a week – he was just what my mother needed and what she should have had when she was younger. She loved the life she created with Jack – they were together for about twelve years. What that taught me is that it is never too late to have a relationship – even if you are not looking for it. It wasn’t until she had been married to Jack and I came home on a holiday that she said to me: ‘I can understand now why you were so difficult to control when you were younger because with Jack I have had’ – I’ll never forget what she called it – ‘my first organism.’

I didn’t correct her – how could I when she had confided her innermost secret? After she’d told me, I think we both collapsed into peals of laughter and just about wet ourselves at the kitchen sink. It was a really poignant time between the two of us when she was saying to me that now she understood.

Her whole personality changed with this new man. Mum was always a glamorous woman and Dad never appreciated her or even expressed his pleasure at how she looked. But Jack wanted to show her off all the time and was obviously so proud of her. Mum really loved being made to feel special like that and it made me feel good to see her happy in that way – embracing this part of herself that had been so buried all her life.

I know they were having sex well into Mum’s eighties because I would stay with them when I came home and it was obvious what they were up to. I thought: ‘This is bloody marvellous – I have this to look forward to in my old age.’

When Mum was in her eighties and Jack died, she went into a nursing home and I went home to visit her. My kids at the orphanage in Cambodia said: ‘Why doesn’t she come here?’ and I explained what a nursing home was – this place you send your parents when you can’t take care of them. They were horrified.

They said: ‘You should be home taking care of your mother,’ and I said: ‘Well, I can’t be in two places at one time – I am either here with you or at home with my mother.’ They decided they would rather I stay with them of course, but they were still very critical.

When I visited her there, I used to take her out in a wheelchair because it was a long way to walk to the car, and as I’d wheel her past the recreation room where the other old people were, she’d say to them: ‘I am going home with my daughter for a holiday,’ and you could tell she was really thrilled about coming home with me.

We always stayed at my girlfriend’s house and we slept together in the same big bed. She said to me one morning: ‘You snore,’ and I said: ‘Well, you fart,’ and we both sat around laughing.

I used to get her up in the morning and we would have a shower together just to make sure that she didn’t fall over or anything like that. You can imagine – in those days, I was more than a hundred kilos and she was a tiny little thing and we would both be in the shower together. Afterwards I’d sit her on the toilet seat and I’d powder her all over. She really loved being pampered, and I was happy to do it. That was the closest we had ever been.

She had a bout of neck cancer and when the doctor told her, she asked what the prognosis was.

He said: ‘Well, you can have radiation.’

‘How much longer would that give me?’ she asked.

‘About six months.’

Mum said, ‘I’ll take it.’ She loved life enough to want to fight. But after those six months, the doctor told her the cancer had come back. She didn’t want any more radiation then. She made all these decisions by herself.

Towards the end, I was there, talking to her all the time because I had read somewhere that when you’re in a coma or dying the last sense you lose is your sense of hearing.

When she was near the end, I whispered to her: ‘Mum, please don’t die today – it’s April Fool’s Day, so please hang on for another day.’ And she did.

You’re never really prepared to lose your mother. It was early in the morning and I was watching her breathing – it was very laboured. She breathed in and out, in and out and then she breathed in and then there was nothing out – I knew that she was gone.

The undertakers came and I said: ‘She wants an open casket but in my opinion she looks horrible.’ I didn’t think it would be respectful of me to let people see her like that. The funeral director said: ‘Don’t you worry about that, give us two days and come back and have a look at her before the funeral. You can make up your mind then whether you want the open casket or not.’

They did an amazing job. She had everything done and I went to look at her and I tell you, she never looked so good in her whole life.

She had mascara, she had blue eyeshadow, she had her nails done and she looked fabulous, really fabulous. After the funeral, I went to the funeral director’s office to pay the bill and I said: ‘Can I drop off and have my face done?’

Mum’s funeral was standing room only and half the staff came from the nursing home because she was loved so much there. Six of my Cambodian students were studying at Adelaide University at the time and they all came too. That was the first time I really realised how popular my mother was with people and it was heartwarming.

She was almost ninety-five when she died three years ago. She had the cover of my book posted on the back of her door in her room at the nursing home so that when she was in bed she could look at it, and every time the carers would come in her room, she’d say: ‘That’s my daughter, up there.’ In the end, she was very proud of me.

Losing Mum really showed me how much my children in Cambodia have lost and it made me feel more grateful for the kind of life and relationship with my mother that I had. It hasn’t changed the way I treat them – I have always loved them with all my heart – but it helps me understand more what they’ve lost.

On the second of April each year, I light an incense stick in my little spirit house and go out in the moonlight. I also light a candle and pray, and then, inside, I light another candle and let it go all the way down till there’s nothing left. That’s my tribute to Mum.