The Shattered Wife

Ji-Soo's age, 34.

An age that feels like it’s too early to have already ‘withered’—having lost its bloom—yet too late to start anything anew.

She was labeled a mother of two upon her early marriage.

Raising a six-year-old and four-year-old boy, it’s been a long time since Han Ji-soo, the person, was erased from the suffocating battlefield of parenthood.

Although she had the name of a full-time housewife, Jisoo's daily life was much fiercer than most office workers.

At the time when everyone else was asleep, she relied on the dim light of the stand in the corner of the living room to cling to her side job.

To add even a little to the children’s kindergarten tuition, she started managing SNS markets and taking on data labeling jobs. By saving hundreds of won or thousands of won per case, Jisoo endured the pain of losing her eyeballs every night.

Pain relief patches had already dried up on her wrists, and her shoulders felt weighted down by stones.

"Mom, I'm hungry!"

"Mom, look at this! I took my toys!"

The children's cries, which began at 7 a.m., were tantamount to Jisoo's declaration of war.

After a sleepless night of side jobs, Jisoo headed to the kitchen, rubbing her eyes.

In consideration of the nutrition of the children, I made anchovy stock and seasoned vegetables, but in my head, I checked the list of side jobs to be closed today.

On the way back from sending the children on a kindergarten bus, Ji-Soo took out her cell phone and turned on a used trading app instead of entering the house.

It was also one of Jisoo’s important tasks to take pictures of clothes that children couldn’t wear because they were small and kitchenware that they bought and couldn’t use.

After packing the delivery box and running to the convenience store to finish sending it, it was time for the children to return.

'Let's hang in there a little longer. I can buy you a complete collection of my children when I get the money for my side job this month.'

That simple hope was the only driving force that kept Ji-Soo going.

For Ji-Soo, the word "rest" was a dead word that existed only in the Korean dictionary.

It was a night when I fell asleep exhausted after spending the day like that.

I woke up at dawn to see the time of the second child's falling cry, who brought a cold from the daycare center.

'2 a.m.'

When I touched my second child's forehead, the heat from the palm of my hand was unusual. 39 degrees Celsius.

Like water just before the boiling point, the child's body was hot.

Even after taking the fever reducer, there was no sign that the fever would decrease, and the child's face was already red and breathing hard.

The husband's seat was still cold.

"Is it a company dinner again today?"

The first child is also awake and whining at the cry of the second child.

Holding the hand of the first, holding the second, and coming out of the house to take a taxi.

Taxis are not easily caught in the cold early morning air.

My toes filled through my bare feet and roughly crumpled slippers, but Jisoo was more afraid of her second hot breath on her back than of her own cold.

He waved like a madman at the passing empty car.

I arrived at the emergency room in a taxi that I had a hard time catching.

Even though it's early in the morning, the emergency room is full of emergency patients and there's nothing in the mind. The first child's small shoulder, which was not properly dressed, keeps tilting to the side.

What's wrong with that young man sleeping on the cold floor of the emergency room at this late hour? If my husband had been around, I wouldn't have made him suffer like this...

The child's fever has finally gone down.

The temperature, which had sent her into a panic by crossing 39 degrees Celsius, had finally fallen to 37.2...

When the tension was relieved, the senses of the whole body came back to life like a scream.

Her shoulders, stiff from carrying the child, ached with sharp stabs of pain, and her soles, numb from running around in thin slippers, burned in the cold hospital air.

Jisoo fixed her first child's nodding hand. The child's small hands were as cold as an ice sheet.

"Hang in there. Let's go home and sleep now."

As I left the hospital door, the blue early morning air greeted Jisoo. 5 a.m.

The fishy, cold air that was just before the world woke up stuck deep into Jisoo's lungs.

Even for that short time waiting for a taxi, Jisoo patted her back nonstop.

The sound of even breathing of the sleeping second child was delivered on a blanket.

"Me too... I want to fall asleep too."

The only thing I could think of was a white bed. The street lights passing out the window were pushed back weakly, like Jisoo's past years, when I loaded myself into the back seat of the taxi.

Arriving in front of the house and getting off with two children was like another huge climb.

I woke up the first child, who was full of sleepiness, to let him walk, and I carried the second child again, being careful not to wake him up.

I could see myself reflected in the elevator mirror.

The head was scattered and tangled, and the face was as squishy as a sick man for a few days.

Jisoo looked away from her shabby self. Now it was a luxury to even have time to grieve.

In front of the arriving house, the tip of the finger pressing the door lock number shook finely.

"Beep beep beep beep beep beep"

It wasn't the warm warmth that greeted Jisoo as soon as she pushed through the heavy front door, but the disgusting smell of alcohol stung her nose.

And on the floor of the front door, my husband's shoes fell off and was rolling around.

Expensive imported shoes with one side upside down and the other bent. The disorderly appearance was breathtaking, as if representing Jisoo's broken daily life.

But rather than resenting my husband, the fatigue of drinking until dawn for my family came to mind first.

"Honey, you must have been tired too..."

Jisoo carefully laid the children down in the room.

I put on a blanket and looked at the children's calm faces for a long time before coming out to the living room.

And I neatly arranged my husband's shoes scattered on the floor of the front door one by one.

It hurt a lot every time I bent over, but Jisoo believed it was a medal she would carry as a wife and mother.

Jisoo approached her sleeping husband with her mouth open in the living room.

The smell of alcohol vibrated, but it broke my heart when I saw his untidy tie.

'You did a great job today, you worked so hard every day that the kids were able to take their medication and go to the ER.'

As soon as Jisoo tried to wipe her husband's cheeks, she found a cell phone barely getting out of his husband's pocket.

"Oh... What's this?"

It seemed that the phone my husband was using was placed on the living room table. Jisoo was the latest model to look up from her pocket and have three lenses she had never seen before.

He always said, "If you want to work outside, you have to be neat," and he was a husband stocking up on custom suits and shoes.

When Jisoo worked hard to buy her children a full house every night, he seemed to have created a "second world" just for himself inside this expensive machine.

At that time, the battery red light was flashing.

The moment I picked up my phone thinking I should charge it so I don't have a problem on my way to work tomorrow morning. That moment of pain was the start of a disaster that would change Jisoo's life forever.

"honey ♥ Thank you for today. Good night!" ♥

Ji-Soo's hand was shaking like crazy. I was out of breath because the heart emoticon on the screen seemed to poke my eyes.

"Honey?"

I burst into laughter.

What on earth was my dawn holding a child on the cold floor of the ER...

The cowardly hope of a spam message had already been shattered. Jisoo roughly grabbed her sleeping husband by the shoulder and shook him. Then she whispered.

"Honey... What's this?"

I killed my voice for fear that the children would wake up, but she couldn’t hide her trembling.

Jisoo's whisper penetrated her husband's ear like a sharp blade with rage.

My husband looked into his phone with half-open eyes and instead of feeling sorry, he looked at Jisoo with a disgusting look as if she were looking at a bug.

Her husband's cold gaze stuck in Jisoo's chest like an arrow.

Then the husband frowned and became angry.

"Hey! Why are you looking at someone else's phone?"

She then took her phone from Jisoo's hand and threw it directly toward the wall of her living room.

"What are you doing!"

My phone broke with a dull explosion, but my husband didn't blink.

Rather, after peeking at my phone, I snorted as if I had committed a greater sin, and soon fell into a deep sleep, snoring again as if nothing had happened.

Heart emojis that still flicker through the broken liquid crystal were like laughing at Jisoo's crumbling world.

I wanted to scream right away, but Jisoo chewed my lips to the point of bleeding, fearing that the children who had barely fallen asleep while struggling in the emergency room all night would wake up.

Jisoo, who came into the room alone with a heart that was about to burst, stayed up all night with her open eyes until the morning.

Yesterday's shock and betrayal ate away at every corner of her body, but Ji-soo tried hard to smile and finished attending the children's daycare center.

The corners of my mouth, which I forced to pull up to maintain my mother's shell, trembled.

Jisoo, who returned to the empty house after sending the children, sat in front of the dressing table as if she were possessed, instead of lying down on the bed. There was a strange woman in the mirror.

Thirty-four. The unmarried friends were still at the age of "youth," but in the mirror that Jisoo looked at were only "mothers" in T-shirts dangling from loose skin.

Her sorrow continued.

Is he dating another woman because he gave up on becoming one? No, that was a cowardly excuse.

Her husband's affair was not because of Jisoo, it was just because of his inferior instincts and cowardice...

At that moment, I suddenly remembered the precious money my mother sent me as a birthday present.