Jiyoung gives birth to Jiwon

Kim Jiyoung gives birth to her daughter, Jung Jiwon, after labor is induced because she is well past her due date, the baby is growing larger, and the amniotic fluid is running low. The birth is both a moment of overwhelming tenderness and the beginning of a physical and domestic ordeal: Jiyoung cries at the sight of her newborn, then tends her day and night while recovering in pain. The episode makes childbirth more than a private family milestone. Its close attention to labor, exhaustion, and invisible care challenges the ideal that a good mother should accept suffering as proof of love.

Before the Delivery

By the time the birth approaches, Jiyoung has already experienced how gendered expectations shape her working life. At the marketing agency, she enjoys her work and colleagues, but interactions with clients are strained by the clients’ age, status, and sexist humor. When one client head makes a joke using the misogynistic term Doenjangnyeo, Jiyoung and a senior colleague smile awkwardly and change the subject rather than risk worsening the situation. At a later business dinner, a client team steers Jiyoung toward a seat beside its division head despite her objections. He makes comments about her appearance, asks about her romantic life, and repeatedly pressures her to drink. Her effort to get through these encounters requires managing her visible reactions as well as doing her job.

The professional setting also shows how vulnerable women’s work can be to the demands of care. A subordinate in Jiyoung’s company quits after the cost and uncertainty of arranging childcare, combined with frequent late nights and weekend work, become untenable. Jiyoung, meanwhile, had worked hard to succeed at her first assignment: she revised a press release through several sleepless nights, and its final version was published and picked up by newspapers, a magazine, and a news network. These details give the approaching birth a career context. Motherhood does not follow a failure to work or an absence of professional commitment; it arrives in a life where effort and competence have already been established, yet care can still narrow a woman’s choices.

The night before entering the hospital, Jiyoung and Jung Daehyun share grilled pork belly and rice, then go to bed early. She cannot sleep. Memories surface in no deliberate order: her older sister helping with homework, Oh Misook forgetting the pickled radish in Jiyoung’s school-trip kimbap, and a colleague bringing her plain rice puffs when morning sickness was at its worst. As each memory returns, the feelings and physical sensations attached to it come back vividly. Jiyoung eventually falls asleep near dawn and dreams several times that she is giving birth. The recollections connect the impending arrival of her child to the women and acts of care that have shaped her own life.

Labor and Birth

Jiyoung checks into the hospital early and changes into hospital clothes. In the pre-delivery room, she receives an enema and treatment to induce labor, with a fetal-movement monitor strapped around her belly. Nurses and a doctor take turns performing cervical examinations, waking her each time she begins to doze. To Jiyoung, the repeated examinations feel intrusive, while the developing labor feels like a natural disaster unfolding inside her. Pain begins at her tailbone, grows stronger, and comes at shorter intervals; she tears at the corners of her pillow and howls.

The labor continues without sufficient cervical dilation or signs that the baby is descending. Jiyoung experiences her body as being twisted and separated at an impossible angle. As the contractions intensify, she repeatedly begs for an epidural. It gives her and Jung Daehyun two and a half hours of relief, but the pain after that respite is much more intense. The sequence lingers on the changing force and rhythm of pain rather than presenting labor as a smooth passage to a happy ending. At four in the morning, Jung Jiwon is born. Jiyoung cries even harder at the sight of her daughter than she did during labor: tenderness arrives not instead of pain, but amid its immediate aftermath.

Jiyoung has chosen hospital delivery with expert help because she believes it is the safer option for both mother and baby. In the wider public discussion, however, the Ideal of Motherhood and Natural Childbirth gains popularity through documentaries and publications that valorize minimal medical intervention. Accounts that speculate about possible harms from medical treatment can make women feel guilty and afraid. Jiyoung’s choice sets a different standard: a birth plan depends on the parents’ values and circumstances, and should not be treated as a test of maternal devotion. The labor scene’s insistence on pain and medical decisions gives that distinction concrete bodily stakes.

The Physical Cost of Care

After the birth, the immediate demands of looking after Jung Jiwon leave little room for recovery. The baby cries day and night unless she is picked up, so Jiyoung holds her while doing chores, using the toilet, and trying to nap. Breastfeeding every two hours means that she cannot sleep for more than two hours at a time. She cleans the house more thoroughly than before, washes the baby’s clothes and fabrics, and makes sure to feed herself well enough to produce milk. She cries more than she ever has and hurts all over. Care appears not as one loving gesture but as a repeating schedule that occupies her body, time, and attention.

The strain becomes specific in Jiyoung’s wrists. One Saturday morning, she leaves Jung Jiwon with Jung Daehyun and visits a nearby orthopedic clinic. The doctor says her wrists are inflamed, but not seriously, and explains that he cannot prescribe strong medication while she is breastfeeding. When he suggests physical therapy, Jiyoung shakes her head. Asked to rest her wrists, she says she cannot: she has to care for the baby, do the laundry, and clean. The exchange makes the gap between medical advice and daily conditions plain. Rest is recommended, but the work that has injured her continues to require her hands.

The doctor dismisses her complaint by comparing modern housework with the harder labor women once performed without washing machines or vacuum cleaners. Jiyoung’s unspoken response is that appliances do not complete the work on their own: someone must load and unload the washing, hang the clothes, and clean and maintain the vacuum and its rags. The machines may alter the tools, but they do not erase the labor or decide who performs it. Her wrist pain therefore registers more than a temporary injury; it exposes how routine household work can remain unseen even when its physical consequences are visible.

Maternal Ideals and Inherited Experience

Jiyoung asks Oh Misook what raising her children had been like and whether it had been difficult. Oh Misook describes a household in which a baby cried day and night, Jiyoung’s father never changed a diaper, and Jiyoung’s grandmother expected three meals a day. With three children to care for, Oh Misook was exhausted, in pain, and frequently falling asleep. Jiyoung has not heard this history told in detail before—not from her mother, relatives, or friends who have had children. The conversation gives a hidden history of maternal labor a voice, linking Jiyoung’s present exhaustion to work that women in her family endured without making it public.

That silence contrasts with the familiar images of motherhood Jiyoung has encountered: babies presented as pretty and sweet, mothers as beautiful and noble. She considers herself responsible and capable of raising her child, but praise for her supposed nobility does not comfort her; it makes her feel guilty for being tired. The birth and its aftermath thus resist a story in which devotion makes physical limits disappear. Jiyoung’s daughter is cherished, yet love does not prevent sleeplessness, pain, or the unequal distribution of care. The episode’s significance lies in holding those truths together, rather than allowing maternal affection to conceal the labor that sustains it.