Is there anyone more adept at making a teenage girl feel uncomfortable about her body than her grandma? Roxy, the teenage girl in question, thought not. Especially after an entire weekend spent with her grandma, Grace, for the first time since becoming an official teenager. In fact, she had turned thirteen just two weeks prior to this visit. And yet, already, it was as if a switch had flipped inside both of them—one that found Roxy feeling both hypersexual and hypersexualized, and one that left Grace feeling the innate need to turn back the clocks to the point where Roxy was still a little girl, when sexual thoughts and “aesthetics” were far from being the dominant topics on her mind. Not just because Grace selfishly wanted her only granddaughter to stay a “baby” forever, but because she knew that Roxy was no longer safe from the ogling eyes that were now going to plague her.

Eyes that were roving and impure in intention. Eyes that wanted to objectify and violate. Grace couldn’t stand this notion. Couldn’t bear to think of her granddaughter being a victim of men’s lusty desires. The girl she’d spent years nurturing and caring for when Grace’s daughter/Roxy’s mother couldn’t. Not that Erin didn’t try her best to be around as often as she could, but there was money to be made. And whatever opportunity she had to make some, she took it. That often meant passing Roxy off to Grace. Which ultimately worked out okay since the two got along swimmingly. That is, until the first weekend Roxy stayed there after turning thirteen. The weekend of “the shift” between them.

It all started when Roxy asked Grace if she could go out with friends that Friday night. This, to Grace, was already highly unusual, a red flag. For Roxy had never tried to go out at night before, and Grace honestly didn’t know what the protocol was for such a request. Nor did she want to call Erin at work and ask. Not just because she didn’t want to trouble her daughter or make her seem “problematic” to her employer, but because she was afraid Erin would approve the request. And Grace wanted to shoot it down with impunity. Felt it was her grandmotherly responsibility to prevent Roxy from allowing her friends to peer pressure her during “off hours” in addition to the hours she already spent with them at school and during her occasional after-school activities. However, Grace had also been informed by Roxy that she was quitting the only sport she partook of: soccer. Another harbinger of doom, Grace felt. Once a girl gives up a sport or “hobby” like that, it opens the floodgates to other, far less constructive pursuits. Drugs, boys, sex. And then, next thing she knew, Grace would have a pregnant teenager for a granddaughter. Having been a pregnant teenager herself, that was the last thing Grace could ever want for Roxy.

Maybe she was being overly paranoid and protective about it, but she couldn’t stop herself from getting uppity with Roxy when she kept insisting on this request to go out. “No, Rox, you’re staying here this weekend” was her final answer. One that resulted in Roxy’s venomous comportment over the course of the next forty-eight hours. Nothing that Grace did could soothe her granddaughter’s oppressed soul. It seemed as if, to get even with her, Roxy also went out of her way to do things that she surely knew would get a rise out of Grace. For instance, when one of Grace’s placation tactics turned out to be taking her to the Ross down the block (even driving them there instead of advocating for a walk as she usually would), Roxy seized on the opportunity to try on what can only be described as the “sluttiest” attire. At least, that was the word that came to Grace’s mind—along with trollop, tart and trash. And she did it so underhandedly too. Grace had been willing to buy her a few things…within reason. But she hadn’t been able to see everything that Roxy had grabbed for her dressing room session.

Who knows what might have happened if she hadn’t decided to peek her head behind the curtain to offer up another suggestion (an “adorable” tank top with a teddy bear on it—a selection that Roxy could only sneer at)? For all she knew, Roxy might have shoplifted the items she knew Grace wouldn’t approve of. When she looked in on Roxy, it was at that moment she caught her in the midst of taking pictures of herself with her breasts popping out of a pink lace corset top that Grace was absolutely horrified by. Who was this person? Grace wondered. It surely could not be her granddaughter. No, not at all. There must be some mistake. Maybe Roxy had been body-snatched (though she would have simply told Grace she had a body that was “snatched”) and replaced by some vapid sexpot type. Because, evidently, Grace had forgotten that such a description was often what it meant to be a teenage girl. Then, of course, there was the fact Grace grew up in a very different time. Oh sure, she had been “influenced” by outside sources telling her how to be and act as well, but her inspirations as a girl seemed to have more substance. When she was Roxy’s age, she could remember idolizing Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton. Women who made it clear there was so much more to them—and their gender—than looks. Grace knew that girls of Roxy’s generation didn’t really have that. Not in any meaningful way.

Maybe that was part of why Roxy had so easily been sucked into the dark side of what it meant to be a teen girl. There were no role models or guardrails anymore. It was all one endless phone-oriented blitz of telling them how to be, brainwashing them to believe they needed to look and act older than they really were. Grace couldn’t believe how different Roxy was even from Erin’s generation, which at least came of age before the omnipresence of social media. That’s why Erin still looked like an innocent, “unpolished” and “uncoiffed” girl when she was thirteen.

Roxy stared back at her grandmother defiantly and said, “Can you get out?”

But no, Grace would not yield. Just like grandmothers that had come before her and grandmothers that would come after, it was her job to put Roxy in her place—by embarrassing the shit out of her. So instead of backing away, Grace ripped the curtain further open and exclaimed, in front of everyone nearby, “My word Roxy! Your boobs are popping out of that top like snow cones! You can’t get that!”

Roxy’s entire face immediately turned bright red. Probably as much due to her humiliation as it was to her anger. She whipped the curtain closed again and started muttering to herself. Grace could only make out phrases like “so embarrassing” and “can’t believe her.” So it had come to this. Grace was no longer going to be a source that Roxy turned to for comfort and friendship, but a barely tolerated “relic” who “just didn’t get it.” The shift was complete. And it almost made Grace sob right then and there in the fluorescent lighting of Ross. Instead, she took a deep breath and calmly told her granddaughter, “Meet me by the registers, okay hon?”

“Yeah, fine. Grandma.”

Her name had now become derogatory, that’s how palpable the shift was all of the sudden. But it wouldn’t stop Grace from trying to find her granddaughter somewhere in there every now and again. For the other role of grandmothers, apart from making their grandchildren cringe at a certain age, was to love and support them no matter what. Even in the face of their insolence and ingratitude. Not tolerating such behavior was, alas, the luxury of parents.