Being a Stay-At-Home Mom Isn’t for Everyone: Profile of Julie Swendsen Young
Julie Swendsen Young describes herself as a short story writer at heart. That is, until she wrote her debut novel: Rules for Mothers. Her journey on the page—from short-form to full-length project—took her years to complete. But in Rules for Mothers, it takes just one year to capture stay-at-home mom Elly Sparrow’s descent from seeming domestic bliss to a stay in a psychiatric unit.
The novel opens in August 1984 as Elly greets every nurse, orderly, and patient in the psychiatric unit with a warning: “About the trap of motherhood, the toxic hormones of childbirth that promised every daybreak would be brilliant, every sunset exquisite, so you didn’t see the lid descending over the trap until the air became thin, until your body ached for replenishment.” Young says this was not the original first chapter. She brought this closing scene to the forefront on the advice of an editor. “She suggested that the story should begin there to really hook the reader,” Young said over Zoom. “I was resistant because I don’t always want to know something like that in a book, but in this case, I do think it made a difference.”
That wasn’t the only time Young opened herself up to outside suggestions over the ten-year period that she worked on Rules for Mothers. Elly first popped into her head in 2017. Young had a character and a premise: being a stay-at-home mom isn’t for everyone. But she wasn’t sure about the form. “I had conceived this as a short story,” Young says. “A day in the life of an overwhelmed young mom. Like a Mrs. Dalloway story. I like to talk or write or read about what’s happening with one’s consciousness. Their feelings—what’s going on in my character’s head.” She kept Elly’s story tight, leaning on her experience from short stories and flash fiction. (She has published in Surging Tide (“Cherry Red,” January 2022) and Timberline Review (“Jesus Loves Me,” Spring 2016, and “Jeopardy,” Spring 2024)). However, there was too much to say on the topic to fit in a short piece. “I tried this out as a short story, and my critique group said, ‘This doesn’t work. This needs to be a novel.’”
Young turned to her own parenting experiences to flesh out the details of Elly’s world. Like Elly, Young raised her own kids in the ‘80s. And while her motherhood and marital experiences differed from Elly’s, Young used her memories of Star Wars toys and her Volkswagen Vanagon to bring color to Elly’s fictional world. Those were her favorite parts of the book to write. “I read recently how authors are encouraged to write what you know,” she said. “But then it was added, ‘Write what you know, but you can always know more.’ And that was what I really pushed myself to do. Imagine how Elly is going to go about reclaiming what she feels she can’t find out about herself.”
Young noted the cultural shifts in parenting in the ‘80s. “We had children on milk cartons. Missing children,” Young says. Parents were worried, and they were expected to keep their children in their sights at all times. “I never bring that up in the book, but to some extent I think it adds to the responsibilities of this woman, that she needs to keep her eyes on her children all the time. If somebody gets hurt, it is on her.” Elly struggles with these unspoken rules, dedicating herself completely to her four children, but losing herself in the process. The protagonist wrestles with her identity and purpose under the weight of those expectations and domestic responsibilities and seeks the freedom to know herself again. She loves her children, but isn’t sure who she is without the titles of wife and mother.
Young wrote of Elly: “She realized now that drudgery let her feel sorry for herself. It defined her. Without martyrdom, she had nothing, was nothing.” As she wrote that line, Young felt Elly thinking critically about herself: “She had gotten herself to a place where she was so miserable, where if [drudgery] was taken from her, she didn’t have any other feeling left. That was how hard she was on herself, to the point that she couldn’t see that anyone else saw anything in her other than that role of mother. And she was defining it as the place she didn’t want to be, but if she didn’t have that, she wouldn’t exist.”
Young drew on her ten-year experience as a clinical social worker to flesh out Elly’s mental health struggles, saying, “I had clients who got locked in their role in a relationship. If the relationship changed, they didn’t know anymore what their role was, even if it was a negative one.” Even with that informed background, those parts of the book were the most difficult for Young to write: “I had to do a lot of drafts and rewriting. As a writer, it was challenging, but also exciting when maybe it worked.”
She changed the title of the book several times and decided to call it Rules for Mothers after writing one of the final scenes. She wrote: “Mothers don’t leave their children, never mind that fathers all over the world did this, many of them multiple times, and the earth kept turning. Dan [Elly’s husband] had called [Elly] vile, but she wasn’t. The rules for mothers were vile.” These lines were inspired by a note on Young’s desk that reads “Mother is a verb.” The note led to a conversation with her husband about parental roles: “We looked it up, and mother [means] to caretake. To nurture. To father is to procreate.” After that conversation, Young researched mothers who left their children and the public’s response to it: “I think when men leave their children, they become something like a deadbeat dad. We write them off. But when women do it, they are really a bad person.” To Young, never leaving the children is the cardinal rule for mothers. And from it comes all other expectations for women in caretaking roles.
Young envisions a different scenario for Elly if the book were set today. She says, Elly might not have even gotten married. If this [book] were set right now, I think that would be one of the most significant changes.” Elly’s lifestyle—being a stay-at-home mom to four—would put her in the “tradwife” category today: “She would be considered almost an anomaly, to be a traditional woman at home while her husband is at work.”
Young remains committed to her own work. She is developing a second novel about the impact of divergent religious beliefs on three generations of an American family. She also plans to return to her roots, playing with tighter word counts once again with a new short story collection around the theme of loss—loss of hope, loss of innocence, and loss of life. In this new work, the lessons she learned in her ten years writing Elly will remain in place. “I’m not someone who is going to have three chapters for a closing,” Young says. Just like Rules for Mothers, Young’s new projects will carry the hallmarks of flash fiction—pointed prose, with no sagging and nothing superfluous.
Brochu’s Zoom interview has been edited for content and clarity.