M’sian Comic Artist’s Diary About Being a WFH Parent Will Make You Laugh & Cry

By Ameera Rosli  •  09 Apr 2021 in Design

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Being a parent is definitely one of the biggest commitments in life and it can be both intimidating and exciting.

From watching your child’s birth right before your eyes to struggling to raise them and in a blink of an eye, to the tears when they decide to leave the nest, parenthood comes in many nuanced stages and all of them deserve to be immortalised and remembered.

For 37-year-old Malaysian comic artist Mohammad Yazid Kamal Baharin a.k.a Zid, his memories with his daughter and his journey as a parent during this tricky work-from-home period has been aptly encapsulated in a series of comics that read very much like a diary.

Simply titled, Diary of a Work-from-home Dad, the comic has since warmed the hearts of many readers, garnering more than 1,000 shares on Facebook in addition to audiences from other social media platforms including Instagram and Twitter.

The KL bred artist, who has conceptualised designs for characters in the titular King Kong comics by Legendary Comics, decided to draw his life when his daughter, Dalya, was diagnosed with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) and Hypotonia.

For those of you who are unaware, PWS is a genetic disorder caused by the loss of function of specific genes in the body, while Hypotonia relates to weak muscles.

In his diary, that acts like a photo album brimming with memories, Zid details how difficult it is to be a WFH parent during the pandemic.

Of course, for most of us who live alone, working from home is a godsend since we’re literally in pyjamas most of the time, nestled up between our sheets as we work. But the same can’t be said if you have kids.

For Zid and many other parents, WFH is a daily battle of trying to get work done while your children pull on your sleeves, probably asking you to check-out some arbitrary thing they’ve managed to cook-up. Speaking to Mashable SEA in an interview, Zid explained,

“I keep getting these impressions thrown at me that I’ve had it easy because I work from home therefore everything is flexible. They’re not.

“If you go to work, you get that time and space segregated to get things done, to earn a living, uninterrupted. And when you get home, you return to your family and you get to be away from work to spend quality time together. And you get a fixed income at the end of every month.

“For me, every second away from work is a loss of income. But at the same time I want to be as involved as I can be with my girls. And then there’s the pandemic. All the challenges cranked up tenfold when you have nowhere to go but within the walls of a proverbial doomsday bunker.”

Dalya’s special needs hasn’t made it any easier for the freelance comic artist either. According to him, she doesn’t sleep like normal growing children would which leads to him and his wife taking odd shifts in caring for her.

Most of the time, Zid will start work late at night and only go to bed at dawn, when his wife has woken up from sleep.

The diary, while hilarious at times, will definitely cause some tears to well-up in your eyes regardless if you’re a parent or not.

It’s definitely worth the read and you can check it out here.