Stinky Shoe Lane? Who in their right mind wants to live on a street that constantly reminds them of, ugh, gym socks and sweaty Nikes? I also can not imagine anyone wanting to live on Cockroach Court, Dead Flower Drive or Average Joe Place. Home builders and city planners are well aware that street names are important to the people who reside in their communities. They are not going to jeopardize their investments by giving their streets appalling names.

Many streets are simply numbered, but often they are named for leaders, states, trees, and things of beauty, so as to bring pleasant thoughts to those who drive them. Sometimes I have to laugh, though, as I drive down Waterfall Road or River Bend Drive when we are nowhere near a water source—or when I turn onto Mountain Meadows Court and Eagle Rock Lane in the middle of a beachside suburb. The images are lovely, though, so I keep driving and thinking happy thoughts about the kindly people who bestowed such names upon ordinary roads.

Where am I going with this? As mothers (and parents), there are plenty of unappealing, humdrum responsibilities associated with raising children—things that have to be done. Laundry, middle-of-the-night care, cleaning, and picking up clutter—to name a few. If we are going to do these things anyway (hopefully with help from the whole family), why not give them more exciting, appealing descriptions? I would like to present a few ideas for spicing up the everyday work we do. Even though giving a “name-lift” to a household chore will not change the chore itself, it may give you another reason to smile during the day.

I would like to begin with a story called, “My best friend, Laundry.” I know what you are thinking…”Laundry is not my best friend—it is simply something I try to keep on top of so we will all have clean underwear.” Maybe you delegate laundry to other family members or hire someone to do it for you, but at one point or another, laundry makes its way into every parent’s life.

This story is from my sister’s friend Kim, a mother of six children, two of whom have been diagnosed with autism. Needless to say, laundry day brings HUGE piles of clothing out into the forefront of her home, where she sorts, treats stains, etc. According to Kim, the laundry used to ruin her whole day (and my guess is it overflowed into the rest of the week), until she took on a new perspective. Kim told me, “I decided that if I was going to spend an entire day with something, it had better be my best friend, so that is what I call it. As I look at each stained shirt, I think of how much fun my children had making those stains, and I think about how much I love my family. On laundry day, when someone asks, ‘What are you doing today?’ I respond, ‘Hanging out with my best friend, Laundry.’”

I have not quite developed Kim’s same optimism, but I will say that laundry day has become more enjoyable since I have started thinking about it as my best friend (though I enjoy it most when the whole family does laundry together—it can be our whole family’s best friend!).

Another area of “mom” life that often causes the grumpies is middle-of-the-night waking. Whether a baby needs to be fed, a bed is wet, or someone has the stomach flu, moms are often up around the clock. I always felt frustrated when one of my children would call to me in the night, and I wondered why I could not be more like my mother, who treated me with such love and gentleness when I awakened her (I seriously thought she enjoyed when I came into her room at 3 am).

Then one day I had a talk with a friend who said she loved being up at night with her children because it gave her the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with each child. I thought she was joking, but as we continued our conversation, I realized that if I do not like getting up at night, at least I can tell myself that I do.

Back in high school, I noticed that every time I said or thought the word “test,” my shoulders would get tense. I decided to refer to all exams as “opportunities.” On my way to a calculus test, I remember telling a friend, “This is going to be a wonderful opportunity to see how much we have learned these past few weeks.” She looked at me as though I had integrals and derivatives tattooed to my forehead, but the word “opportunity” somehow made the whole experience more amusing.

This is the principle I have tried to apply to nighttime waking: whenever one of my children needs me at night, I think, “What a wonderful opportunity to spend some one-on-one time with him (or her)!” This is assuming I am in a thinking state and not merely sleep-walking down the hall. Though I do everything in my power to encourage my children to get through the night without me, and though my husband takes turns with the night duty, this one change in my thinking has made me a much happier mom.

One final area in which a positive title has made a difference is in home cleaning and clutter control. As a college student living in my own apartment, I did cleaning checks once a month and straightened up my room every couple of weeks. When I became the mother of a toddler, I felt like all I did was follow my daughter around the apartment—picking up the contents of every cupboard she emptied (as renters, we were not allowed to drill child locks into our cupboards).

I remember the afternoon when I spoke to my mother on the phone and complained to her about all the messes my little one was making. She counseled me, “When you look at each mess, just think of it as the result of growth and development. Even though you wish the apartment would stay clean, aren’t you glad that your daughter has the desire to explore and the ability to walk?” I had to agree—even though I had just put all of her clothes back in her drawers for the sixth time that week.

Now, when I see papers and crayons on the kitchen table, toy cars scattered in the living room, and even toilet paper rolls unrolled all over the bathroom, I smile (sometimes it is not a genuine smile, I’ll admit) and say, “What a wonderful display of growth and development!”

The “Fly Lady,” who many of you may have heard of, is an expert in keeping her home clean. She has several books and products and runs the website www.flylady.com. One thing I admire about her is that she calls cleaning house “home blessing.” We are not expected (and we do not expect our children) to find deep joy and satisfaction in toilet cleaning and diaper changing—it is not always the chores themselves that bring a sense of accomplishment, but the overall result: blessing our homes. When we can look past the jobs we do not specifically enjoy and see them for what they really are, and for what they are doing for our families, we will feel less stress about doing them.

An easy response to the daily tasks of motherhood is, “I am too good for this! Why should I have to do chores all the time? The messes are overwhelming! Can everyone just leave me alone and stay clean?” However, we need to remember that sustaining life is valuable work. The point of this article is not to enforce gender stereotypes or convince women that they should do ALL the housework and do it happily. Every job has its unpleasant parts, and whether you do many jobs or one job, the work you do by providing a safe, clean, loving home for children is just as noble as other life-sustaining jobs (doctors, police officers, fire fighters…). Giving our responsibilities more exciting titles may sound silly, but it works, and it is no sillier than calling a strip of gray asphalt something better than Stinky Shoe Lane.