Jason Om still remembers the panic. He was alone with his mum in their suburban Melbourne home, aged 12. She clutched at him, unable to breathe.
A trembling Jason tried calling his grandmother. His dad was out. He then called the ambulance and followed a woman’s instructions to try and perform CPR "perfectly", pinching his mum’s nose, blowing into her mouth, and pumping her chest with his hands.
But it was too late. At 44, after six days on life support, his mother died of a heart attack.
Later, confused feelings of grief and relief flooded him at the loss of a woman who could be affectionate and loving but also "cruel and strange", sometimes telling him he was a "mistake".
“Survival meant building a wall around her,” Om writes in his debut memoir All Mixed Up, on growing up in 1980s suburban Melbourne.
Jason Om. Source: Sanjeev Singh
"Part of me was relieved we no longer had to deal with a crazy person in our lives and that the family dramas would surely end. I blocked out the night I’d called the ambulance. I even avoided visiting her grave.”
Om, a regular fixture on television as an ABC reporter, tells his story of his mother’s complicated past and how it reverberated across his life.
He had a half-sister, living in Malaysia, her existence still full of unanswered questions.
Meanwhile at home he endured his mother's mood swings, and occasional mutterings that she "wanted to die."
Then there was her traumatic death on the cusp of her son’s adolescence.
School life wasn’t any easier for Om, a queer kid who copped racial epithets and remembers being largely left to fend for himself as a teen.
But he dreamt of bigger things and a career in television. He remembers practising his future presenter voice at his drive-through cashier job at Hungry Jacks.
As he moved out of home and had his first boyfriend, he told his father he was gay, a disclosure that was met with the refrain, "we sent you to a Catholic school."
The dislocation Om experienced in his youth was mirrored in his relationships and work life as he travelled to South Australia in his 20s, attempting to climb the competitive world of television in the noughties before diversity was a buzzword.
“There’s shame and secrecy on a number of different levels. It’s heritage, it’s how I felt about mum, my sexuality, and dad,” he says.
“I was (also) in South Australia where it was predominantly white, and you could really sense that you do feel like an outsider.”
By 2013, Om was in his early 30s and it was the 20th anniversary of his mother’s death. He was now a successful journalist, but behind his polished professional persona, he felt the ghosts of the past haunting him.
“After mum died, I put up the barricade, the emotional barricade. But it was still there, it's something I carried. It was still there, up until I had to sort of confront it,” he says.
Om decided to deal it the way he knew best, using his skills to investigate his own life by trekking to Malaysia to retrace his mother’s story.
He met up with his Muslim half-sister Sarah, who he had heard about as a child and met briefly in Australia as an adult and on sporadic trips to Kuala Lumpur, but they had only skimmed the surface of their pasts. For the first time they would interrogate what little they knew about their mother.
Sarah was born of their mother’s first marriage to a charismatic Muslim Malay man, which ended in divorce.
Not only was their mother disowned by her strict Catholic family for converting to Islam, after the divorce she lost custody of Sarah, who was shipped off to a relative’s house.
She was cajoled to forget the past and move to Australia to start a new life, her primary contact with Sarah a series of secret heartbreaking letters.
Through his research into his family history, Om had discovered these letters and medical reports showing a woman plagued by the devastation of losing a child, becoming more despairing as her mental health deteriorated.
He discovered his mother had been hospitalised for a psychotic episode and had attempted suicide.
“I yearned to hold Mum and comfort her. I wished I could give her a hug for all the times I’d treated her badly because of the stigma of her illness,” he writes in his book.
Sarah also broke down when she saw the letters showing how hard their mother worked to seek custody of her; and her father’s refusal to budge.
Om found his fact-finding trip with Sarah, now a deeply religious woman, an emotional experience. They both mourned a mother who struggled to be present in their lives.
“I wept,” he writes of his Malaysia trip. “Not over the loss of Mum, but at my newfound comprehension of the struggle she and Sarah had endured.”
I do feel now at peace with that part of my life, particularly around my mum, because it feels like everything’s been resolved
Om also had a 16-year struggle to find acceptance of his sexuality from his father, a journey which he wrote about in a viral during the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite.
The change in attitude from the time of his turbulent teens to now, where his father wonders why he didn’t get more airtime during a Mardi Gras broadcast, amazes even him.
“He's made a 360-degree turnaround. (It is) amazing in terms of going from 15, 16 years of deep denial to watching me march in the Mardi Gras. That's huge!”
Now in his 40s, Om admits while it’s been a long journey, he is finally reconciled with his past.
“I do feel now at peace with that part of my life, particularly around my mum, because it feels like everything’s been resolved.”
Striving and loving against the odds is a theme he returns to again and again.
“What is it that kept Mum going and what made Mum stick by her daughter, who she didn't have access to? Or what made me and my sister stick to each other?
“What made Dad stick by his gay son? Love is a strong word, but it is love that I think drove each of us.”
Coming to terms with both his parents’ histories as survivors of violence and how it shaped them and him is a meditation on loving across gulfs.
“It’s kind of about tough love in a way, because underneath all the dirt, the love under the rubble, it's there…it's a big excavation, but it's there.”
is appearing in conversation with Paul Kennedy and Rick Morton at the Sydney Writers' Festival on May 19, 2pm - 3pm.
Jason Om’s memoir, All Mixed Up is published by ABC Books.
