Mom-roaches

Mom-roaches is a contemptuous label directed at mothers like Kim Jiyoung, whose time spent caring for a child is mistaken for leisure. The expression enters the novel during a brief attempt at rest in a park: while Kim Jiyoung drinks coffee beside her sleeping daughter, nearby office workers speak of mothers as comfortably living on their husbands’ pay. Their words turn visible domestic care into supposed idleness, making the small scene a sharp measure of how motherhood is judged and whose labor is counted.

The label in the park

After a heatwave gives way to autumn weather, Kim Jiyoung picks up Jung Jiwon from daycare and pushes her stroller toward a nearby park. Jung Jiwon falls asleep on the way. Kim Jiyoung continues rather than turning home, buys a discounted Americano from a new café across the street, and sits down for coffee—the first time in a long while she has done so in a park.

Office workers around her age sit on the next bench, drinking coffee from the same café. Kim Jiyoung recognizes that they may also be tired and frustrated, yet feels envy toward them. One man glances at her and murmurs to his colleagues. She cannot make out every word, but catches fragments portraying mothers as living off a husband’s paycheck, lounging over coffee, and having an easy life. The label Mom-roaches condenses that accusation: a mother’s presence in public is treated as evidence of idleness, while the care that brought her there disappears from view.

Kim Jiyoung rushes out of the park, spilling hot coffee on her hand. Jung Jiwon wakes and cries, but Kim Jiyoung does not notice as she pushes the stroller home in a daze. The insult disrupts the rest of her day: she feeds her daughter cold soup, forgets to put on a diaper, and later hangs laundry she had forgotten she washed. When Jung Jiwon is asleep and Jung Daehyun comes home after midnight with red-bean-filled goldfish cakes, Kim Jiyoung realizes she has eaten neither lunch nor dinner. She tells him that people call her Mom-roaches.

The work the accusation erases

The park scene follows an earlier, carefully considered decision about whether Kim Jiyoung could combine paid work with raising a child. Before Jung Jiwon’s birth, she worried that daycare or a babysitter would not cover the couple’s late hours and weekend work, while neither set of grandparents was available to help. She also felt guilty for imagining that someone else might care for a child who had not yet been born.

The couple wrote three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning at all. If both kept working, the practical choices were sending the child to Jung Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny. His parents were willing, but elderly, and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. A nanny would be costly and would share the family’s everyday life, with no clear answer to how long that arrangement would last. They concluded that one parent would have to stay home, and that it would be Kim Jiyoung. Jung Daehyun’s job was more stable and better paid; convention also made a working husband and a wife at home seem the usual arrangement.

That decision made the parkgoers’ assumption especially reductive. Kim Jiyoung had named what she stood to risk in having a child: her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future. Jung Daehyun offered to help with diapers, feedings, and laundry, but the couple’s eventual plan still placed her outside paid work. The label presents the result as comfortable dependence rather than as a costly division of responsibility.

A short interval consumed by care

When Jung Jiwon begins daycare a little after twelve months old, she adjusts well. Her day runs from a 9:30 a.m. drop-off through a snack, playtime, and lunch, with Kim Jiyoung collecting her before 1 p.m. That schedule leaves Kim Jiyoung roughly three hours, excluding drop-off and pickup. Most of the interval goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks; she hardly finds time to sit down with coffee.

The novel places this daily accounting beside a broader statistic: mothers with children under two have an estimated four hours and ten minutes to themselves if they stay home, and four hours and twenty-five minutes if their child attends daycare, a difference of only fifteen minutes. Daycare changes whether chores are done with the child beside the mother, not whether care and housework occupy the day. Against those details, the park accusation mistakes a rare pause for the whole of Kim Jiyoung’s life. The coffee is real; the supposed leisure it is made to represent is not.

A recurring language of gendered judgment

Mom-roaches belongs to a wider pattern in which language turns women’s conduct into a target while disguising unequal expectations as humor or praise. At a business lunch, a male client calls Kim Jiyoung a Doenjangnyeo after she orders soybean paste sauce with rice. She cannot tell whether he intends a joke or an insult. Because he laughs, his staff laugh; Kim Jiyoung and a senior colleague smile awkwardly and change the subject. In her work with clients, laughing at such remarks can be read as encouragement, while not laughing invites questions about what is wrong. The burden of managing the exchange falls on the women who receive the comment.

The hiking club offers a different-sounding but related example. Its male members call women flowers among weeds and carry their belongings, let them choose food, and give them the better rooms on trips. Yet the club’s president, vice-president, and secretary are all men, and it has a boys-only alumni group. Cha Seungyeon insists that women want the same responsibilities and opportunities, including the chance to run for president, rather than special treatment. Together, these episodes show how apparently playful or flattering descriptions can keep women in a subordinate role. Mom-roaches is harsher: it does not praise mothers, but mocks them by treating care as idleness and dependence as a personal failing.