Maternal love

Maternal love is both an intimate attachment and a moral demand in Kim Jiyoung’s life: the care that binds a mother to her child is repeatedly celebrated in terms that can make exhaustion seem noble, ordinary, and beyond complaint. The novel places that ideal beside the material work of childcare, the limits on family support, and the silences that keep mothers’ difficulties from being recognized. Its most pointed challenge is not to affection itself, but to a culture that treats a woman’s capacity to sacrifice as evidence of what a good mother ought to be.

The ideal and its demands

The pressure surrounding motherhood appears alongside other expectations that women accommodate those around them. At work, Kim Jiyoung likes her colleagues and finds her first job more manageable than she had feared, yet dealings with clients are different. Older male executives make jokes she cannot comfortably answer: laughing encourages them, while not laughing prompts questions about what is wrong. At a business dinner, she is steered toward the seat beside a male division head despite her repeated attempts to stay with her colleagues, and she is pressured to drink. These encounters do not concern childcare, but they establish a familiar demand: women are expected to manage their own discomfort so that others can remain at ease. The ideal of maternal love will later place a more intimate version of that demand inside the home.

Before having a child, Jiyoung worries about what pregnancy might do to her body and whether she can continue her career while caring for a baby. She and Jung Daehyun both regard having children as a natural next step after marriage, but the decision does not feel equally abstract to her. Daycare or a babysitter may not cover the couple’s late workdays and weekends, and neither set of parents is available to provide regular help. Jiyoung feels guilty even considering care by someone else before the child is born, while also fearing that the child could grow up with parents who have too little time. Daehyun promises that he will change diapers, feed the baby, and wash the baby’s clothes; he also tells her that, if care cannot be arranged, she need not keep working for money. He listens as she explains her anxiety, but his reassurance does not answer the question she asks about what he himself would give up.

Care as lived work

After giving birth to Jiwon, Jiyoung’s days make the cost of care concrete. Jiwon is born at four in the morning, and Jiyoung is overwhelmed by tenderness; the baby then cries frequently and needs to be held through chores, bathroom trips, and naps. Breastfeeding every two hours prevents Jiyoung from sleeping for more than two hours at a stretch. She washes the baby’s clothes and fabrics, cleans the house, and tries to eat well enough to produce milk, while crying more than she ever has and experiencing pain throughout her body. Her wrists become so difficult to move that she goes to an orthopedist while Daehyun watches the baby. The doctor explains that joints can weaken after childbirth and that stronger medication is not appropriate while she is breastfeeding. Affection and physical depletion occupy the same account; one does not cancel the other.

Jiyoung’s mother cannot stay to help her recover because she is working longer hours at the porridge shop. Competition from new restaurants has reduced the business, and having fewer workers means more work for her, though she brings Jiyoung leftovers when she can. She praises her daughter for breastfeeding and raising the baby without her help, presenting maternal love as an almighty force. Jiyoung asks what her mother’s own experience of raising children was like: whether it was hard, whether she regretted having so many, and whether she too had been almighty. Her mother’s answer overturns the polished ideal. Raising three children was hell: Jiyoung’s sister cried day and night, Jiyoung’s father never changed a diaper, and their grandmother expected three meals a day. Her mother was exhausted, in pain, and often falling asleep. The contrast reveals how praise can conceal labor even within a family: the daughter is admired for managing alone, while the mother’s own past hardship had not been described to her in detail.

Birth, choice, and guilt

The novel also challenges the moral ranking of childbirth methods. Around the year Jiyoung married, a television documentary and subsequent publications helped make natural birth widely popular, emphasizing minimal medical intervention and the mother and baby making their own decisions. Jiyoung chooses a hospital birth with medical professionals because she believes it is safer. For her, the decision belongs to parents’ values and circumstances, not to a contest over which woman is more devoted. Yet media coverage of possible adverse effects of medical treatment and medication on newborns, even when the causal connection is speculative, can stir fear and guilt. Women may be expected to accept pain, exhaustion, and fear as a demonstration of maternal love, although people routinely seek medication or anesthesia for other forms of discomfort. The ideal thus converts a practical decision about safety into a test of maternal virtue.

Jiyoung resists being told that she is noble or that others are proud of her. She is responsible and committed to raising her child well, but praise framed around selfless endurance makes her feel guilty for being tired. The images she has encountered on television and in films—beautiful babies and beautiful, noble mothers—leave little room for the ordinary realities she is living. Her mother’s candid account supplies a counter-image: not a failure of love, but a history of care shaped by unequal work and insufficient rest. Jiyoung’s brief thanks for the food her mother brings cannot encompass what has gone unsaid between them.

Recognition and the limits of praise

The novel’s later clinical frame extends the question beyond Jiyoung’s household. A psychiatrist initially interprets her symptoms as postnatal depression that developed into childcare depression, but as treatment continues, he becomes less certain that his first diagnosis accounts for her experience. Jiyoung does not readily complain about the injustice of her circumstances; when encouraged, she recalls events clearly and calmly. Her measured manner does not mean that there is no suffering to understand. The psychiatrist acknowledges that he may have diagnosed her hastily and that her account has disclosed a world of which he had been unaware.

His recognition is also shaped by his wife’s career. He describes her as having made successive compromises, moving from the pursuit of a university position in ophthalmology to contract work and eventually giving up her career. Their son’s school difficulties lead his wife to suspend work and take on an intensive routine of preparing meals, washing and dressing the boy, taking him to and from school, arranging lessons, and sleeping in his room. When she rebukes the psychiatrist for claiming to know the boy despite spending little attentive time with him, he concedes that her criticism is true. The episode makes care visible as both labor and knowledge: the person doing the daily work sees things the more professionally authoritative observer has missed. Across Jiyoung’s story and the psychiatrist’s household, maternal love remains real, but it cannot fairly be used to make unequal responsibility, career loss, or exhaustion seem natural and therefore undeserving of attention.