Postpartum Depression

Postpartum Depression is a condition Kim Jiyoung experiences after giving birth, but the novel situates her distress within a wider landscape of bereavement, childcare, unpaid domestic labor, and ideals of maternal sacrifice. Her symptoms are treated clinically, yet the psychiatrist’s later account questions whether a diagnosis focused on depression alone could encompass the circumstances of her life.

Onset and Compounding Loss

Kim Jiyoung is suffering from Postpartum Depression when she learns that her friend Cha Seungyeon has died giving birth to her second child from an amniotic fluid embolism. The news arrives when Jiyoung is already struggling to manage everyday tasks, and its shock makes that difficulty worse. Seungyeon was not a distant acquaintance: the two became friends through a university hiking club, despite neither enjoying hiking, and remained close after Seungyeon graduated. Her wedding reception was where Jiyoung first met Jung Daehyun. The death therefore connects childbirth not only to Jiyoung’s own new responsibilities but also to the loss of a friend with whom she shared an important part of her life.

The account does not reduce Jiyoung’s condition to that bereavement, or identify one event as its sole cause. Instead, the loss lands amid the demands of caring for a young child and Jiyoung’s difficulty carrying out ordinary tasks. The narrative’s emphasis on this accumulation matters: emotional distress is presented in relation to the life around it, not as an isolated symptom.

The Work of Care and the Burden of Maternal Ideals

Jiyoung’s domestic workload remains substantial even when she has modern appliances. When she tells a doctor that she must care for the baby, do the washing, and clean, he contrasts her life with women’s harder work in the past and asks what women today have to complain about. Her own account of the machinery’s limits exposes what that comparison leaves out: laundry still has to be gathered, washed, removed, and hung, while cleaning requires work beyond owning a vacuum. Technology changes how housework is done; it does not make the work disappear.

The novel also notes that domestic labor is alternately dismissed as idling at home or praised as work that sustains life, while its monetary value goes uncalculated. That refusal to count the work obscures both its scale and who performs it. Jiyoung’s mother, meanwhile, cannot help her recover from pregnancy because the porridge shop needs her extra hours. She brings Jiyoung leftovers when she can, but the family’s practical support is constrained by her own labor and by the need to support Jiyoung’s younger brother’s extended education.

Praise can deepen Jiyoung’s isolation rather than relieve it. Her mother celebrates her as a thin young woman who has given birth, breastfeeds, and raises her child without help, attributing this to maternal love. But when her mother recalls raising three children while Jiyoung’s father never changed a diaper and Jiyoung’s grandmother expected three meals a day, she describes exhaustion, pain, and constant demands. Jiyoung has rarely heard mothers speak about those experiences in such detail. The idealized images of beautiful, noble mothers on television and in films make her feel guilty for being tired, even though she is responsible and capable of caring for her child.

The novel extends this critique to the pressure surrounding childbirth. Jiyoung chose hospital delivery because she considered it safer, while public discussion of natural birth and speculative warnings about medical intervention could make women feel guilty or afraid. The ideal of maternal sacrifice thus reaches beyond daily childcare: it can turn a decision about safety into a judgment about whether a woman’s love is sufficient.

Time, Childcare, and Material Pressure

When Jung Jiwon starts daycare shortly after turning one, she adjusts well. Her routine runs from a 9:30 a.m. drop-off through a snack, playtime, and lunch, with Jiyoung collecting her before 1 p.m. The arrangement gives Jiyoung about three hours without her daughter, but most of that time goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food and snacks. She has hardly any time to sit down with a cup of coffee. Daycare creates a window in which to do chores, not an uncomplicated stretch of rest.

The book sets Jiyoung’s experience beside statistics on mothers’ discretionary time: a stay-at-home mother with a child under two has four hours and ten minutes a day, while a mother whose child attends daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes, a difference of only fifteen minutes. The comparison makes visible how childcare changes the conditions under which housework is done without necessarily freeing mothers from it. For Jiyoung, the ability to concentrate on getting chores done is a relief, and the teacher’s suggestion that Jiwon might nap at daycare and stay later prompts her to consider starting something new.

That possibility sits alongside financial pressure. After the couple’s two-year lease ends, the landlord raises the rental deposit by 60 million won, forcing them to borrow again despite having paid off their earlier deposit loan. They cannot afford to buy a home on Jung Daehyun’s income alone, and future kindergarten and after-school costs add to the strain. Housing, living, and education expenses leave Jiyoung feeling pressure to bring in money. The novel presents her interest in new work not as a simple return to personal ambition but as a possibility shaped by both limited time and household economics.

Diagnosis, Treatment, and Reassessment

Jung Daehyun first visits the psychiatrist alone to discuss Jiyoung’s symptoms and treatment options. He arranges an appointment for her, presenting it as a therapy session because she has not been sleeping well and seems stressed. Jiyoung thanks him and says she has been feeling low and enervated; she suspects maternity blues. The episode shows that she recognizes a change in her state, even though she does not describe it in the same clinical terms later considered by the psychiatrist.

In the psychiatrist’s retrospective account, treatment consists of 45-minute sessions twice a week. The frequency of Jiyoung’s symptoms decreases but they do not disappear, and she is prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills to address depression and insomnia. The psychiatrist initially considers dissociative disorder after hearing Jung Daehyun’s description, then settles on what seems to be a typical case of postnatal depression progressing to childcare depression. As treatment continues, that confidence weakens.

The reassessment arises from the way Jiyoung speaks in sessions. She does not continually complain about her present suffering or return insistently to childhood trauma; when encouraged to talk, she retrieves long-buried memories herself and describes them calmly and coherently. The psychiatrist comes to suspect that the initial diagnosis was hasty, not because Jiyoung’s difficulties are unreal, but because the clinician had failed to recognize the world surrounding them. Postpartum Depression therefore remains part of the account of Jiyoung’s experience while the ending resists treating a diagnostic label as a complete explanation.