Kim Jiyoung’s resignation from her marketing job is presented not as a retreat from work but as the outcome of a family decision made under sharply unequal pressures. As her due date approached, she and Jung Daehyun compared childcare plans and costs; they concluded that one of them would have to stay home, and that the person would be Kim Jiyoung. Her departure ends a job she enjoyed and a source of independence, while exposing how employment, income, and gendered expectations shape who absorbs the practical costs of raising a child.

The Work She Was Leaving

Kim Jiyoung had adjusted relatively well to her first official job. She liked her colleagues and found the work enjoyable, even though dealings with clients could be difficult. The agency worked for client companies whose older male executives brought sexist humor and assumptions into professional interactions. Kim Jiyoung and her colleagues had to manage these encounters without a response that reliably ended them: laughing could invite more, while not laughing could prompt questions about her mood. The workplace thus offered genuine collegial support alongside an external professional environment that made her position less comfortable.

A business dinner made that imbalance especially plain. After Kim Jiyoung and her team had helped organize a client company’s anniversary event, the client’s marketing team invited them to dinner. At the restaurant, senior male staff directed Kim Jiyoung to sit beside their division head despite her insistence that she wanted to remain with her colleagues. Her male coworker could offer little more than a nervous presence, and Kim Eunsil arrived after Kim Jiyoung had already been seated. The division head pressured her to drink and made demeaning remarks about her appearance and private life. The incident belongs to a wider pattern of workplace interactions in which clients treated women’s discomfort as something to be managed rather than a reason to stop. It helps explain why the job’s value cannot be measured only by whether the work itself was rewarding.

Yet the agency was also a place of friendship, accomplishment, and self-support. Kim Jiyoung had more good colleagues than bad, and felt closer to many of them than to her college friends. Completing assignments gave her a sense of achievement; earning her own money gave her a measure of control over her life. She did not leave because she was incompetent or lazy, and the work had not simply been a burden. That contrast gives the resignation its particular weight: a meaningful first step into working life was lost even though Kim Jiyoung valued it and had found a place within it.

The Childcare Decision

Before the birth, Kim Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun considered three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning at all. For each plan, they discussed who would care for the baby, what that care would cost, and the advantages and disadvantages. Their regular late nights and weekend work made relying on daycare or babysitters alone difficult, while their parents could not provide the needed support. The available options narrowed to sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny.

Neither arrangement offered a workable resolution. Jung Daehyun’s parents were willing to raise the baby, but they were elderly and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. A live-in nanny would share the family’s daily life as well as care for the child, and the couple worried about the cost, finding someone suitable, and how long they would need that arrangement. They also considered the years of childcare before the child could manage school, after-school activities, and meals more independently. The couple concluded that one parent would have to stay home. Jung Daehyun’s job was more stable and paid more; beyond those economic considerations, it was also more customary for husbands to work while wives cared for children and ran the home. The choice was discussed together, but its consequences fell on Kim Jiyoung.

The unequal stakes had already surfaced in their conversation about having a child. Kim Jiyoung worried that she might not be able to keep her career and felt guilty at the thought of someone else caring for a baby they had not yet had. When Jung Daehyun offered to help with childcare and household tasks, she asked what he would be giving up. She named her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future as things placed at risk. His anticipated losses included seeing friends less often, coming home earlier, and feeling constrained by work dinners and chores; he also described financial support as a major responsibility. Kim Jiyoung tried not to react emotionally, but felt that his potential sacrifices were slight beside the possibility of her life being thrown off course. That earlier exchange clarifies the imbalance behind the later decision.

Leaving the Agency

As the due date drew closer, Kim Jiyoung went back and forth between taking maternity leave and quitting altogether. Taking the longest possible leave and deciding later seemed sensible, but was not ideal from the company’s and her colleagues’ perspectives. In the end, she did not return to work. Jung Daehyun suggested that, once their child was older, they could use babysitting and daycare to give Kim Jiyoung time to study or seek another job, and described the transition as a chance to begin a new chapter. She recognized his sincere support, but objected to the language of helping: childcare, household work, and finding her another job were being framed as tasks he would assist her with, rather than shared responsibilities for their home and child.

Kim Jiyoung did not cry when she told the company head she was quitting. She did not cry when Kim Eunsil said she hoped they would work together again, while she brought her belongings out of the office a little at a time, at the farewell party, or during her final commute home. The grief arrived the next morning. After seeing Jung Daehyun off, she returned to bed and woke around nine, mentally arranging an ordinary working day: breakfast near the station, lunch at the Jeonju Diner, perhaps a movie, and a trip to the bank. Then she realized there was no office to go to. The loss became real not in a dramatic farewell, but in the collapse of a routine she had expected to continue.

Aftermath and Significance

The narrative places Kim Jiyoung’s personal decision alongside the broader pattern of women leaving employment after marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, or the education of young children. Around the time she left, in 2014, one in five married women in Korea had quit for reasons of this kind. The reported employment rate for women fell from 63.8 percent among those aged twenty to twenty-nine to 58 percent among those aged thirty to thirty-nine, before rising to 66.7 percent among women over forty. The figures frame her resignation as more than an individual preference: the decision takes place within a recurring pattern of career interruption around childbearing and care.

After Jung Jiwon began daycare shortly after turning one, Kim Jiyoung had about three hours to herself between drop-off and pickup. Most of that time went to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks; even with daycare, she could hardly sit down for coffee. The account notes a small statistical difference in reported daily time to oneself: four hours and ten minutes for a stay-at-home mother with a child under two, compared with four hours and twenty-five minutes for a mother who sent a baby to daycare. The difference was only fifteen minutes, with the main change being whether the housework was done alongside the child or without the child present. Daycare eased one pressure and gave Kim Jiyoung space to consider starting something new, but it did not erase the domestic labor that had helped displace her from paid work.

The resignation therefore marks both an ending and a continuing condition. Kim Jiyoung loses a workplace that had offered income, achievement, and belonging; she takes on the daily care and housework that the couple’s employment arrangements could not accommodate. The narrative does not equate leaving a job with lacking ambition, nor does it treat caring for a child as evidence that a mother has no career passion. Instead, it keeps both truths in view: Kim Jiyoung loves and cares for her child, and the loss of her work and future plans remains a loss.