A child cannot easily hold the idea that the enormous, powerful, supposed-to-love-them adult is simply wrong, is simply cruel, because that idea is too frightening — it means the world is not safe and the big people cannot be trusted, which is unbearable to a small creature entirely dependent on those big people.

So the child does the thing that is, in a terrible way, more bearable: she concludes that she must have done something, that she made Grandma mad, that if she were only better the hurt would stop.

She takes the blame, because taking the blame at least preserves the illusion that she has some control, that the world makes sense, that goodness on her part could earn safety.

And it is the most insidious injury of all, because it turns the child against herself, installs a lifelong voice that says when I am hurt, it is because I deserve it, because I failed, because I made them mad. I heard that voice being born in my daughter, in a parking lot, in two words, at two years old.