Unpaid domestic and care work

Unpaid domestic and care work in Kim Jiyoung’s story is the labor that keeps a household and a child going while remaining easy to overlook, minimize, or romanticize. After giving birth to Jung Jiwon, Jiyoung spends her days feeding, holding, washing for, and caring for the baby, as well as cleaning and preparing food. The work affects her body, crowds out her rest, and helps redirect her career. Although the couple discusses childcare as a shared problem, the practical and cultural assumptions surrounding them make Jiyoung the person expected to leave paid employment.

Allocation Before and After Birth

The unequal division is visible before Jiyoung becomes a mother. She worries that she may not be able to maintain her career while caring for a child, because both she and Jung Daehyun work late and on weekends, their parents cannot readily help, and daycare or a babysitter may not cover their schedules. Her anxiety is not only about finding care: she feels guilty for contemplating care by someone else before the child has even been born. Daehyun listens and offers to take on tasks such as changing diapers, feeding the baby, and boiling baby clothes. But when he asks her to consider what parenthood might give her as well as what it might take away, Jiyoung names the stakes she sees for herself: her youth, health, job, colleagues, social networks, career plans, and future.

As the due date approaches, the couple puts three possibilities on a large sheet of paper: Jiyoung returning to work immediately, returning after a year of maternity leave, or not returning. They consider who would provide childcare and what it would cost. Sending the baby to Daehyun’s parents in Busan is impractical because they are elderly and his mother has recently had back surgery; a live-in nanny would be expensive and would become part of the family’s daily life. They conclude that one parent must stay home. Daehyun’s work is more stable and better paid, but the decision also follows the more familiar arrangement in which the husband earns and the wife cares for the child and home. Jiyoung had anticipated this result, yet anticipation does not make its consequences less depressing.

The Daily Work of Care

After Jung Jiwon is born, the abstract question of who will care for a child becomes a demanding routine. The baby cries day and night and needs to be held; Jiyoung fits chores, toilet breaks, and naps around carrying her. Breastfeeding every two hours prevents her from sleeping for more than two hours at a stretch. She washes the baby’s clothes and fabrics, cleans the house, and feeds herself in order to produce milk. She cries more than she ever has and is in pain throughout her body. The account makes clear that care is not a single task but a sequence of overlapping responsibilities, with little opportunity to stop when one task is finished.

The effects become physical. Jiyoung’s wrists hurt so badly that she cannot move them, and she visits an orthopedist while Daehyun stays with the baby. The doctor advises rest, which she cannot manage while responsible for the baby, laundry, and cleaning. His comparison with earlier generations, who did household tasks without modern appliances, treats the existence of machines as if it had removed the work. Jiyoung recognizes the missing labor: laundry still has to be gathered, washed, taken out, and hung up, while cleaning also includes handling and washing the equipment. Technology changes how household work is done; it does not make the work perform itself.

Work, Time, and Career Costs

Jiyoung’s change in circumstances is particularly stark beside her earlier paid work. She enjoys her colleagues and finds her first job less exhausting than she had feared, even though interactions with clients can be awkward and demanding. Her work life does not erase the practical conflict between employment and care: before having a child, she already doubts that daycare and babysitting can cover the couple’s late hours and weekends. The labor of arranging care, finding available help, and responding to a child’s needs therefore sits alongside paid work rather than neatly outside it.

The story also connects household responsibilities to the employment decisions of other women. One of Jiyoung’s colleagues, Kim Eunsil, has a subordinate whose frequent late nights and weekend work make childcare difficult. Most of the subordinate’s paycheck goes to a babysitter, yet she still has to search urgently for short-notice care. After bringing her baby to work one weekend, she quits. Kim Eunsil does not know what to say when the subordinate apologizes. The episode shows how care needs can interrupt employment even when a woman remains at work and pays for help: the cost of care and the unpredictability of schedules still fall heavily on the person responsible for the child.

When Jung Jiwon starts daycare a little after twelve months, the new arrangement gives Jiyoung about three hours to herself, excluding drop-off and pick-up. Most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and making food and snacks for the baby; she can hardly sit down for a coffee. The daycare teacher says Jiwon is adjusting well and could stay longer, but Jiyoung initially chooses to collect her shortly after lunch. The possibility of more time nevertheless makes her interested in beginning something new. The change is an opening, but it does not immediately convert childcare hours into leisure or paid work: household tasks continue to claim much of the interval.

Visibility, Value, and Inherited Expectations

The narration places Jiyoung’s day beside figures on mothers’ time. A stay-at-home mother with a child under two is reported to have four hours and ten minutes a day to herself; a mother who sends a baby to daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes, a difference of only fifteen minutes. The comparison challenges the assumption that daycare simply frees a mother from domestic work. In Jiyoung’s case, it changes whether she does chores with the baby beside her, not whether the chores need doing. The small increase in available time is meaningful to her, but the larger pattern remains a day organized around care and housework.

The story describes domestic labor as caught between opposing judgments: some dismiss it as idleness, while others praise it as life-sustaining work. Neither response necessarily counts its monetary value. Jiyoung’s wrist injury and the doctor’s dismissal expose the same gap from different angles: the work is physically real, but its effort is treated as negligible because it is done at home and because appliances exist. Its invisibility is not proof that it takes little time or skill; it helps explain why the household can depend on it without treating it as a cost that must be shared or compensated.

Jiyoung’s mother offers a family history that complicates idealized accounts of motherhood. She cannot help Jiyoung recover after pregnancy because her porridge shop is short-staffed and demanding more of her time, while the business supports Jiyoung’s younger brother as he continues his education. She brings leftovers when she can. When Jiyoung asks what raising children was like, her mother recalls that Jiyoung’s older sister cried constantly, her father never changed a diaper, and the grandmother expected three meals a day; she describes being exhausted and in pain. Jiyoung had not heard this account from her mother, relatives, or friends who had children. Against images of beautiful, noble mothers and praise for her own endurance, this disclosure gives the labor its ordinary, difficult history—and makes clear how compliments about a mother’s strength can leave her feeling guilty for being tired.