After reading “Notes From My Mother”, an essay about a son trying to understand his distant mother, I have analyzed two specific quotes from the passage. One quote  was “I was so lonely knowing her; she was so busy dying.” Hilton Al always felt he had a distant relationship with his mother due to several different reasons. His mother always failed to unite the family as a whole due to her remarrying. She never attempted to unite her second husband and Al, thus they never were close, despite her second husband being Al’s father. This was due to the fact that his mother would rather keep this bond between her husband and her to themselves, thus leaving out this room for love for Al and his siblings. Another reason was since his mother died at a young age, there was never anytime for her to realize her mistakes and to fix their relationship.  Since she was much more focused on life and her relationship with her husband over her kids, she never gave Al the love that a real mother showed for her children. This means that the hole in their relationship that was there Al’s entire life was never given the opportunity to be healed. However, Al did try his best to feel connected with his mother. This leads to the second quote I analyzed, “My brother and I didn’t like Barbados. In the summers, we were sent there, with packages of clothes and food as gifts, but we preferred to imagine the island through my mother’s memories of it.” Even though Al and his brothers did not enjoy Barbados as much, the fact that it was a place that their mother enjoyed meant they always tried to connect with her through imagining the place as a part of her memories. When he was 17, he read a book called “Wingless” about the Caribbean sea that made him understand more about Barbados and the Caribbeans. He read it aloud to his mother after finishing the book, and she replied with “Exactly.”  This was a big moment for Al as it was one of the few times he felt connected with his mother through a book about a place that he never really enjoyed, but still sought to understand for the sake of his relationship between him and his mother. This goes to show the length that Al went to get closer with his mother, and how it was a more one-sided relationship as even though they had a connection, it was brief.