Maternity Blues

Maternity Blues is the name Kim Jiyoung tentatively gives to feeling low and enervated after giving birth. The novel does not establish it as her final diagnosis: instead, her care moves through treatment for depression and insomnia, and her psychiatrist gradually questions whether an early clinical explanation accounts for the life she describes. The distinction matters because Jiyoung’s distress is shown alongside the relentless work and moral expectations of motherhood, not as a condition that can be understood in isolation from them.

Jiyoung’s Initial Explanation

When Jung Daehyun visits the psychiatrist alone, he raises concerns about Jiyoung’s symptoms and treatment. Because she has not been sleeping well and seems stressed, he has booked a therapy session for her. Jiyoung does not appear to know the extent of his concern, but thanks him and acknowledges that she has been feeling blue and enervated. She suspects Maternity Blues herself; this is her tentative account of how she feels, rather than a diagnosis the narrative confirms.

That exchange places the label within the uncertainty of early help-seeking. Daehyun recognizes that something is wrong and arranges care, while Jiyoung can identify her low mood but frames it as a possible response to childbirth. The novel does not treat her self-description as a complete explanation of what has happened to her.

Treatment and Diagnostic Reassessment

In the psychiatrist’s later account, Jiyoung attends 45-minute sessions twice a week. Her symptoms have become less frequent, but have not disappeared; to alleviate depression and insomnia, the psychiatrist prescribes antidepressants and sleeping pills. These details establish an ongoing course of treatment, not a sudden recovery or a settled account of the cause of her distress.

The psychiatrist initially suspects dissociative disorder after hearing Daehyun describe Jiyoung’s symptoms. After his first session with her, however, he concludes that she has a typical case of postnatal depression that has progressed to childcare depression. As treatment continues, his confidence in that explanation fades. He observes that Jiyoung does not readily volunteer her suffering or repeatedly return to childhood trauma, but, with encouragement, she brings up long-buried memories and describes them calmly and logically. He comes to think that he may have diagnosed her hastily. The narrative records this as a reconsideration, not as a definitive replacement diagnosis.

The Work Behind the Symptoms

Jiyoung’s account of motherhood includes ordinary tasks that are easy to mistake for completed work. When she says she cannot rest her wrists because she must care for the baby, wash clothes, and clean, a doctor dismisses her by comparing modern housework with the harder physical labor of the past. Her internal rebuttal is concrete: a washing machine does not load itself, add detergent, hang clothes, or put them away, and a vacuum does not clean and maintain itself. Technology may reduce some physical effort without removing the labor or responsibility from the person doing it.

The narrative also rejects the habit of treating domestic work as either idleness or a noble, life-sustaining calling while leaving its monetary value uncalculated. That refusal to count the labor helps explain why praise can intensify rather than relieve Jiyoung’s strain. Her mother calls her admirable for breastfeeding and raising a baby without help, invoking the power of maternal love; when Jiyoung asks whether raising three children had been hard, her mother admits that it had been exhausting. Jiyoung is responsible for caring for her child, but says that being praised as noble or capable makes her feel guilty for being tired.

The pressure extends beyond housework. In her first job, Jiyoung likes her colleagues, but older male clients subject her to persistent jokes and expect her to manage their reactions: laughing can encourage them, while not laughing invites questions about what is wrong. At one business dinner, client employees steer her toward the seat beside a division head despite her repeated insistence that she eat with her colleagues. He forces several beers on her, comments on her appearance, and makes sexually degrading remarks. These scenes do not establish a single cause for her later symptoms; they show the accumulated gendered demands within which her work, relationships, and eventual care take place.

What the Diagnosis Leaves Open

The psychiatrist’s later reflection widens the frame beyond the individual patient. He recognizes that he may have remained unaware of women’s lives without the circumstances that brought him close to them, including his wife’s repeated compromises in her medical career. His account makes clinical listening a form of learning: Jiyoung’s carefully recounted memories reveal a social world that his first diagnosis did not adequately register.

Yet the novel leaves that recognition unsettled. The same psychiatrist describes Lee Suyeon as an excellent employee whose high-risk pregnancy and decision to leave work create a financial problem for the clinic, then resolves to make sure her replacement is unmarried. His response reproduces the very assumption that women’s childcare responsibilities are workplace inconveniences. Set beside his reconsideration of Jiyoung’s diagnosis, this contradiction prevents treatment from serving as a neat resolution: the psychiatrist can begin to see the structures shaping distress and still act within them. Maternity Blues remains Jiyoung’s provisional name for feeling low after childbirth, while the novel’s account of her care insists that her distress be heard in the fuller context of labor, gender, and motherhood.