3.2. MRS. PALOMAR AND HER CHILDREN
3.2.2. Role Reversal
One day Mrs. Palomar realizes that she is no longer the person she used to be. Rather, her children are the person she used to be, only they understand things in a completely alternate way, as if she were not, in fact, the woman who raised them, but someone they admired from afar as a model of what not to become. They don't want to ask her questions, nor do they seem to have much motivation to care for her, though she is getting visibly older. This seems to anger Mr. Palomar, but Mrs. Palomar would rather they not desire to care for her. As young children, they didn't cling to their mother like most, but rather longed for the independence they now have. Now that they have it, she wants them to have it. It is what makes them the person she used to be.
Mrs. Palomar feels she is gathering dust. She tries daily to brush herself off, to do the things her children like to do so that she feels like the person she used to be. Her children don't like it when she does these things. They don't like it when she tries to be them. The links go around in circles like a strand of pearls around Mrs. Palomar's wrist, ready to break at any moment, sending the cool white beads over the floor of the Palomar home.
Mrs. Palomar wonders if it is possible to avoid this situation between parent and child, this tornado of love and resentment that picks up all the old things from the house and their heads and rearranges them wantonly. She longs for the power to prevent it but knows she will eventually die without knowing how. It is the power of something great, the ocean, a volcano, and Mrs. Palomar has learned from great things only irrelevant truths, not the knowledge to appropriate their power.