My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

Trouble was better than boredom

There's something liberating in imagining that the people who raised us might have actually enjoyed the chaos we created. Mark Twain captures something parents rarely admit out loud—that raising difficult kids isn't just a burden to endure, it's often the most interesting part of their lives. The troublemaking, the boundary-testing, the unexpected comebacks—these become the stories they tell later, the moments they remember with a certain wry fondness.

This shifts how we might think about our own rebellious phases. Instead of pure guilt about the worry we caused, there's room for the idea that our parents were genuinely entertained by us, that our personalities—even the difficult parts—made their lives fuller somehow. It's why parents of grown children often seem more amused than resentful about past chaos. The trouble was never really the problem. Boredom would have been.

There's also a practical wisdom here about parenting and relationships generally. The people worth keeping around aren't the ones who tolerate us—they're the ones who find genuine pleasure in our complexity, who laugh at what frustrates them. Twain's joke about his mother suggests that real love includes a kind of appreciative humor about the other person's nature, trouble and all. That's a relationship worth having.