Reviewing The K-Drama: Green Mother's Club

A tale of inferiority complexes and the social wars of housewives.

When a young professor is in the middle of a lecture, her feelings of inferiority come back to haunt her in the appearance of her former best friend, Seo Jin-ha.

Jin-ha always won the art competitions, they competed together for and stole her crushes.

After having an episode in the lecture room, our main character, Eun-pyo is stripped of her title as a professor and relocates to another neighborhood with her two sons and detective husband.

The neighborhood they move into is very competitive, children are taught to study ahead of their grade- first graders learn fourth-grade content. The respect each mother in the neighborhood gives each other is also determined by their children's grades. In a neighborhood where women make friends with motives, ex-professor Eun-pyo is out of her element.

At first, the mothers are interested in Eun-Pyo. She graduated from a prestigious school, one they dreamed of having their kids attending someday, but when asked about her education plans for her kids she steps on everyone's toes with one line. "I'm not that kind of mom."

Immediately and unknowingly, Eun-pyo makes an enemy of every mom in the neighborhood, including her cousin.

Green Mother's Club is a story about South Korean housewives, how competitive society can be, and how mothers pressure their children to study hard so they can become respectable from young. It sheds an in-depth light on how mothers live vicariously through their kids. While watching, I came to realize some Mothers might be content with letting their kids be kids, but in the long run, it's actually better for the kid to learn different skills so they will have something to fall back on if their dream job or aspiration doesn't work out.

Don't be extreme as some of the mothers on this show though!

Chun-Hui, a Mom respected in the beginning for her talented child, had to learn this the hard way. Her daughter often got good grades and was used to being the center of attention, but when she began to fall behind the rest of the class, she develops a lying disorder. After finally giving up on academics and pursuing their side hobbies like the violin, Chun-hui realizes both her kids were more talented in the music field. It was a heart-warming scene when she saw her eldest who was always at the bottom of his class, play the lead at the concert, she realized how wrong she was. Like a typical parent, she hoped her kids could grow up to become doctors, so seeing her finally take a step back and learn to stop trying so hard, was incredibly beautiful .

As for Eun-Pyo, however, she is forced to eat her words almost as instantly as she utters them.

At school, her child is the most immature and obstructive in class. He never fills out any of the assignments and only doodles on them. It becomes clear to the mothers Eun-Pyo is the type of mom who paid no attention whatsoever to her kids. It's after paying some more attention and trying to enroll him in secondary-learning schools that Eun-pyo learns he is a genius and has ADHD. She gets a little greedy and pushes him to compete on a television show with the other kids, but learns her lesson when he develops selective mutism - Her son realized he became too intelligent to converse with normal kids and fell into shock. He only had one intelligent friend who he could communicate with and that was Henry, the son of Eun-pyo's nemesis, Seo Jin-ha.

Eun-pyo is stunned when she learns Jin-ha settled down and married her ex-boyfriend, a man she met while attending school in France, Louis Benuel.

Even though we're shown flashbacks of Eun-Pyo destroying Jin-ha's artworks out of jealousy as a child, Jin-ha is overjoyed to reunite with Eun-pyo and kills her with kindness, but Eun-pyo is the opposite. She can't bring herself to be nice to her.

Green Mother's Club is also a tale of inferiority complexes, it sheds a spotlight specifically on the loneliness of geniuses and how friends can become enemys very quickly. In the first half of the show, we learn just how jealous Eun-Pyo is of Jin-ha and why, but towards the end, we learn that Jin-ha was also jealous of Eun-pyo.

Why? Jin-ha had it all. She was an artistic genius in her own right, gorgeous, rich and most importantly the child of a distinguished artist. Eun-pyo always felt small next to her, but Jin-ha wasn't a braggart, she was very humble, anxious, and at times she even doubted her own skills, she acknowledged Eun-pyo's eye for art, however, and saw her as an equal, making it harder for viewers to completely get behind Eun-pyo's resentment of Jin-ha. The more we see, the more we learn that this is Eun-pyo's issue: Disliking someone who is sweet and kind can make you feel and appear as a terrible person.

But Jin-ha wasn't a complete saint, as much as she tolerates Eun-pyo being mean to her (and destroying her paintings in the past). Jin-ha deliberately stole Louis from Eun-pyo.

To Jin-ha, Eun-pyo had it all. Eun-pyo had a family that loved her. Jin ha did not. Her mother had schizophrenia and distanced herself. So Jin-ha never experienced a Mother's love growing up, her Father also ended up cheating on his wife with his student, a woman who became her step-mother after her Mother threw herself off the roof of the house. Jin-ha was always lonely. Even when her Father died she felt nothing.

What is fame, talent and riches without love?

Eun-pyo finally realizes that Jin-ha was depressed and thirsting for real love all along, and she never got it. Aside from Jin-ha's son, no one loved Jin-ha, not even her husband. Eun-pyo who at times seemed pretty ungrateful of her current life, and loyal husband finally stops comparing, and starts to appreciate what she has. She finally learns to make her peace with the fact that even if they were jealous of each other, Jin-ha had always seen Eun-pyo as her one and only best friend.