Jiyoung flees the park after being called “mom-roach”

Kim Jiyoung’s flight from the park after hearing herself and other mothers called “mom-roaches” turns a small, ordinary break into a rupture: she runs with hot coffee spilling onto her hand while her daughter wakes and cries in the stroller. The incident makes public the contempt attached to her life as a caregiver, then follows her home into a day of confusion and a painful attempt to explain to Jung Daehyun what has been taken from her.

The Park and the Insult

After the heatwave passed and autumn settled in, Kim Jiyoung collected Jung Jiwon from daycare and pushed her in a stroller toward a nearby park. Jiwon fell asleep along the way. Since the weather was pleasant, Kim Jiyoung continued instead of turning back, bought a discounted Americano from a new coffee shop across the street, and sat on a bench. The clear strand of drool at her sleeping daughter’s mouth and the coffee in her hand marked a rare pause in an otherwise demanding routine.

A group of office workers sat on the next bench, drinking coffee from the same café. They appeared to be around Kim Jiyoung’s age. One man glanced toward her and whispered to the others. She caught fragments: a wish to live on a husband’s pay and drink coffee, a sneer that mothers had it easy, and a rejection of marrying a Korean woman. Their coffee was the same as hers; the difference was that her brief rest, with her sleeping child beside her, was treated as evidence of undeserved comfort.

Kim Jiyoung rushed out of the park, spilling hot coffee onto the back of her hand. Jung Jiwon woke and began to cry, but Kim Jiyoung did not notice as she hurried home, pushing the stroller ahead of her. The flight was immediate and bodily; she did not pause to challenge the men or gather her thoughts before escaping their words.

The Insult’s Earlier Context

The episode belongs to a wider pattern in Kim Jiyoung’s experience of gendered mockery. At her first job, she liked her colleagues and found the work itself manageable, but clients and reporters were another matter. Older male clients repeatedly made jokes whose purpose she could not comfortably answer: laughing seemed to invite more, while not laughing prompted questions about whether something was wrong. At a business lunch, a client head used a misogynistic label for a woman while commenting on Kim Jiyoung’s food; she and a senior colleague smiled awkwardly and changed the subject because the powerful man was laughing and his staff followed suit.

At a later client dinner, Kim Jiyoung was steered into the seat beside a division head despite her insistence that she wanted to sit with her colleagues. He pressed beer on her and delivered sexualized remarks and unsolicited advice about her appearance. Her male colleague could do little beyond watch nervously. These encounters required her to manage her reactions while the men controlled the setting. In the park, the insult is not delivered as a face-to-face exchange, but the same expectation remains: she is exposed to contempt and left to carry its effects herself.

The Day’s Aftermath

At home, Kim Jiyoung remained dazed through the afternoon. She fed Jung Jiwon cold soup, forgot to put on her diaper, and had to change her out of soiled clothes. After the child went to bed, Kim Jiyoung remembered a load of laundry and hung the now-wrinkled clothes to dry. When Jung Daehyun returned after midnight from a business dinner carrying red-bean-filled goldfish cakes, she realized she had not eaten lunch or dinner.

When she told him that people called her “mom-roach,” Jung Daehyun first dismissed the term as something used by foolish adolescents online and said no one used it in real life. Kim Jiyoung corrected him: she had heard suited men, around thirty, say it at the park across the street. Recounting the incident made her flush, and her hands shook. The distinction mattered. What he had treated as distant online abuse had been spoken aloud in public by men who looked like ordinary office workers.

What the Flight Reveals

Kim Jiyoung’s account centers on the price of the coffee: the men had bought the same drink and knew what it cost, yet judged her for having it while caring for her child. She insists that the money is not theirs to police and asks whether she does not deserve a cup costing 1,500 won. Her anger moves from the small purchase to the scale of her loss: childbirth, routine, career, dreams, and a sense of self surrendered to raising a child, only for her to be treated as vermin.

That injury sits against a culture that presents mothers as beautiful, noble, and naturally equal to the task of childcare. Kim Jiyoung has already recognized how such praise can make exhaustion feel like a personal failure rather than a consequence of demanding work. The park scene sharpens the contradiction: motherhood is idealized as selfless devotion, while a mother’s modest act of sitting down with coffee is recast as laziness and dependency. Her flight is not merely retreat from a cruel remark; it is the moment when that public contempt breaks into the practical texture of her day and makes ordinary care harder to sustain.