When Hilton Als described his relationship with his mother he summed it up by saying, “ I was so lonely knowing her; she was so busy dying”. In Hilton Als’s eyes, his mother shared a disconnected connection with him. Through his upbringing he mentions some of the rationale behind this disconnection. Firstly he mentions his discontent with his mother’s inability to branch and connect the family as whole. Her second lover, after her first husband, was his father yet did not share the connection a father and son would typically have. His mother’s rationale that, “never explained the bond that (she and her lover) shared, a bond so deep and mysterious” led him and his siblings to a path, “forever excluded from their love, and forever diminished by it”. However, one may question as to the true extent of Als’s belief of blame on his mother for circumstances which really were not her doing, but rather his fathers. In addition to his discontent with his mother’s ability to create a unified family, Als also describes a relationship which contained dislike for “auntie men”, which I assume are gay men. Ironically so, Als’s own self as a gay man, was a concrete image as to how the two ideologies of both his mother and him collided. His mother, dying from a young age and focused on the hardships of life, did not find the time or effort to truly realize her son hence his sense of loneliness. Her ignorance of Als’s sexual orientation is proof to such a claim. In describing his sexual orientation and its relation to his mother Als also mentions, “I avoided explaining that when I sat in parked cars with one man and then another, I felt closer to her experience of the world than I ever did in her actual presence”. In such context Als describes the irony that he and both his mother have lusted over men ( his mother’s relationship with her lover), in unorthodox ways. Such a notion, provided a better sense of connection between Als and his mother than the actual upbringing he had with her. Both of their seemingly rash decisions of wild romance and lust, allowed them to escape a world filled with stereotypes and rules that confined them. Overall, in both texts Als makes the point in describing the disconnection between the lifestyle that he lives and the one that his mother raised him under.