Jiyoung leaves her job to care for her child

Kim Jiyoung’s departure from her marketing job is a decision made through family discussion but shaped by unequal consequences: caring for their child would end her employment, while Jung Daehyun’s more stable, better-paid work continued. The choice did not mean that she lacked commitment to her career or affection for her child. Rather, it exposes how practical constraints and conventional expectations could turn a shared decision about parenthood into a rupture in her working life.

The decision and its unequal stakes

As her due date approached, Kim Jiyoung went back and forth between taking maternity leave and quitting altogether. Taking the longest leave available would have given her time to assess her options after the birth, even if she ultimately left; from the company’s and her colleagues’ perspective, however, this was not the ideal arrangement. The decision carried pressures on both sides: she was weighing the future of her career while knowing that her absence would affect the workplace.

Before pregnancy, the possibility of combining childcare with work had already troubled her. She had little close experience of pregnancy or caring for a newborn, and could not know how her body might change. More pressing was the question of whether she could keep working when both she and Daehyun regularly worked late and on weekends. Daycare and babysitters alone did not seem sufficient, while their parents were not in a position to provide dependable help. She felt guilty even considering care by someone else before the child had been born, yet also worried about bringing a child into a life where both parents might have too little time for her.

Her anxiety was not simply about whether she could perform two roles well. She understood that becoming a parent might put her youth, health, employment, colleagues, social connections, career plans, and future at stake. When Daehyun urged her to consider what parenthood would bring as well as what it would cost, she asked him to account for his own sacrifices. He anticipated seeing friends less often, coming home earlier, feeling uncomfortable about business dinners or late work, and finding it difficult to take on chores after a full day. He also invoked the responsibility of financial support as head of the household. To Kim Jiyoung, those anticipated adjustments seemed slight beside the possible disruption to her life.

Options considered and the chosen arrangement

The couple discussed the decision carefully rather than settling it in a single conversation. On a large sheet of paper, they set out three possibilities: Kim Jiyoung could return to work straight after maternity leave, return after a year, or not return at all. For each, they considered childcare responsibilities, cost, and other advantages and disadvantages. The exercise made clear how few workable arrangements they had. If both remained employed, the possibilities were sending the child to Daehyun’s parents in Busan or hiring a live-in nanny.

Neither option resolved the problem. Daehyun’s parents were willing to raise the baby, but they were elderly and his mother had recently undergone back surgery. The couple were also reluctant to bring a live-in nanny into their home and everyday family life. Childcare would be only part of that person’s role: the arrangement would reach into household routines and the time the family spent together. They considered the considerable expense, how long they might need the nanny, and the difficulties that could arise before their child was old enough to attend school, take part in after-school activities, and manage dinner. These were not abstract objections but accumulating concerns about whether the proposed care could be sustained.

The couple concluded that one parent would have to stay home, and that Kim Jiyoung would be the one to do so. Daehyun’s work was more secure and brought in more money; beyond that financial difference, the familiar arrangement in which husbands worked while wives raised children and ran the home weighed on their choice. The decision was reached jointly, but its consequences were not shared evenly. Kim Jiyoung already expected this outcome, yet knowing it was likely did not lessen her depression.

Daehyun tried to frame her departure as temporary or potentially productive. He suggested they use a sitter occasionally as the baby grew and send her to daycare, leaving Kim Jiyoung time to study and look for other work, and described the period as a chance to begin a new chapter. But his repeated offer to help with childcare, housework, or a future job struck her as if these were her responsibilities and his participation an extra contribution. She challenged that implication: the home and child belonged to both of them, and if she worked, her earnings would also be part of their shared life. After she spoke sharply, she felt bad for reacting that way following their careful discussion; Daehyun, stunned, reassured her.

Leaving the workplace

Kim Jiyoung did not cry when she told the company head she was quitting, when team leader Kim Eunsil said she hoped they would work together again, as she brought her belongings home a little at a time, or at her farewell party. Nor did she cry on her final commute. The emotional break came the next morning, after she had seen Daehyun off with warm milk and returned to bed. On waking, she began planning the familiar sequence of an ordinary workday: getting toast on the way to the station, buying lunch, perhaps seeing a film after work, and going to the bank. Then she realized that she no longer had an office to go to. The loss became tangible in the collapse of the routine by which she had organized her days; until she could adapt to a life without that structure, even predicting and planning felt impossible. That was when she cried.

Her grief was not a claim that the workplace had been ideal. The marketing agency was her first step into working life, and she found it more absurd than sensible: employees reaped less than they sowed, and clients could make interactions uncomfortable through persistent, old-fashioned jokes. At a business lunch, a client head used a misogynistic label about women after she ordered soybean paste sauce with rice. Kim Jiyoung could not tell whether he meant to joke or mock her; because he laughed, his staff followed, and she and a senior colleague smiled awkwardly before the subject changed. Yet difficult client encounters did not erase her good relationships with colleagues or the enjoyment she found in her work. She got on well with coworkers, completed tasks, and felt a sense of accomplishment as she developed professionally.

The job also gave her a measure of financial and personal independence. Although it paid poorly and did not produce something tangible, earning her own money let her feel that she was managing her life. The company had become a kind of fortress: a place where she belonged despite not being part of a group, and where she found more good colleagues than bad. That attachment explains why leaving could hurt even when she understood the reasons for it. She was not leaving because she was incompetent or lazy, and caring for her child did not mean she had no passion for her career. Nor, as she understood it, would entrusting a child to someone else have meant that a mother loved the child less.

Care after resignation and the meaning of the loss

After the birth, the daily demands of childcare made the costs of the arrangement concrete. Jung Jiwon cried day and night unless someone picked her up. Kim Jiyoung held her while doing chores, going to the toilet, and napping; she breastfed every two hours, cleaned, washed the baby’s clothes and fabrics, and tried to eat well enough to produce milk. She cried more than at any other time in her life. Although these details occur after the resignation, they clarify the work the decision assigned to her and why childcare could not be reduced to time spent at home.

Her mother could not help her recover from pregnancy because the family’s porridge shop required extra hours. Competition from other restaurants had weakened the business, and cutting staff costs meant her mother had to work more; the shop nevertheless provided enough support for Kim Jiyoung’s younger brother to prolong his education. Her mother brought leftovers when she could. She also praised her daughter for raising a baby without her help, calling it the power of maternal love. Kim Jiyoung’s response was to ask whether raising three children had been difficult for her mother. The answer was an account of exhaustion: the babies cried, their father never changed a diaper, and their grandmother expected three meals a day. The contrast reveals how praise for a mother’s strength can leave the hardship of care unspoken, and can make exhaustion feel like a failure rather than a predictable consequence of the work.

When Jung Jiwon began daycare a little after twelve months, she adjusted well and stayed from 9:30 in the morning until before 1 p.m. The resulting three hours were not leisure in any substantial sense. Kim Jiyoung used most of them for laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks, with hardly a moment to sit down over coffee. Even the possibility of a later pickup, after the daycare teacher suggested Jiwon might nap there, mattered because it offered more time to begin something new. The scene extends the meaning of her resignation beyond the moment she left the office: time freed from paid work did not automatically become time for rest or professional renewal.

The narrative places her private decision beside the broader pattern of women leaving employment after marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, childcare, or the education of young children. But its emphasis remains on the particular life obscured by any simple description of choice. Kim Jiyoung and Daehyun weighed alternatives together; their financial circumstances, limited care options, and familiar assumptions about husbands’ and wives’ roles shaped what they could choose. The decision ended her first working life while placing unpaid care at the center of her days. Her sadness registers both what she lost and the fact that the loss was not evidence of a lack of ability, ambition, or love.