A Woman’s Place Is in the Paint

My mother, like so many boomer women before her, was, for a time, obsessed with Oprah. I’d come home from school on weekday afternoons, and at four, my mother — who, in my memory, rarely sat still — would sit on the couch uninterrupted for an hour to watch Oprah interview celebrities, talk about her life and weight loss, and give guests free gifts they (and we) would never forget.

It was during this season of Oprah-watching I remember my mother talking a lot about “defining moments,” the moments in our lives we remember forever, the moments that cause us to pivot or change or swing ourselves in a different direction. A defining moment could be a divorce, a job loss, the loss of a parent or significant other. It could be positive, too: a graduation, a work success, a life-changing comment from a teacher. My mother’s “Oprah moment” involved the flute.

My mom is the seventh of eight children, and all of them can play at least one instrument. My grandad played the piano and the guitar, and he had a beautiful singing voice I only vaguely remember, so rattled was it by emphysema in his later years. All of my aunts and uncles have lovely singing voices, my mother, too, and they played in their high school and college marching bands and sang in the choir and were generally a little reminiscent of the von Trapps.

In the sixth grade, it was my mom’s turn to make it in the band. She desperately wanted to play the flute; her brothers all played the clarinet, and my mother wanted her own claim to fame. She recalls, vividly, all these decades later, being told by the band director her lips weren’t right for the flute. She’d need, like her brothers before her, to play the clarinet.

She was devastated and refused. She never played an instrument, never joined the marching band, the only one of her siblings not to.

This is my mother’s defining Oprah moment, and I heard about it whenever I experienced my own disappointments in middle school and beyond. That band director’s words meant my mother’s own children were strongly encouraged play instruments. I took nearly a dozen years of piano lessons; Chet plays the guitar. Years later, when both of us had left home, my mom enrolled herself in guitar lessons, too. This teacher’s one flippant comment about my mother’s lips haunted her forever, maybe changed, in part, the trajectory of her life.

Because I grew up hearing my mother’s Oprah moment identified and analyzed, I can, of course, name my own.

Throughout childhood, I played basketball: in little Saturday-morning leagues coached by my dad, in summer camps at our local colleges, in the driveway with my brother and our neighborhood friends. I loved basketball. I was ten years old when the Women’s National Basketball Association launched, and I became obsessed with the New York Liberty and Rebecca Lobo, with Sheryl Swoopes (can you imagine a better name?) and Lisa Leslie and Cynthia Cooper. I loved them all, their beauty and their grace evident in every pass and dribble and layup.

I was a girl consumed. My favorite shoes were a child-size version of Grant Hill’s FILAs. They looked ridiculous on my skinny, knock-kneed legs, but I loved them and proudly sported them with my pleated khaki shorts, a braided belt, a manatee necklace, and a T-shirt with an illustration of a WNBA basketball on the front proclaiming “A Woman’s Place Is in the Paint.” I was 12, and my favorite store in the mall was the Lady Foot Locker.

The summer before my seventh-grade year, I made the all-star team during our middle school summer camp. I was thrilled. I wasn’t growing as fast as my peers, but I figured what I lacked in height I might make up for in speed. I was an extremely confident kid, and I wonder now if I was ever any good at basketball at all, or if I just had a convincing imagination. I believed I was destined for basketball greatness; thank God they finally had established a women’s league. I’d have a career!

After the high of becoming a summer all-star, I was sure I was guaranteed a spot on my junior high basketball team. I realized I was leaving elementary school behind, so there were no sure things, but I knew the coach, and all my friends played, so I conditioned and applied myself at every after-school tryout. I recall really believing I’d make it. I was confident, but I also wasn’t cocky, wasn’t stupid. I knew I wasn’t the best player, but I also knew I wasn’t the worst. I worked hard, and I had a decent attitude. I figured if nothing else, I’d ride the bench and cheer my heart out for my friends on the court. The coach who’d put me on the all-star team was the coach of the junior high team, and I figured that was a good sign, too.

I don’t know what school sports are like now; more competitive, is what I hear. But it felt pretty competitive back then, too, because the Monday after tryouts, the coach posted the new team roster in the gym, and I went with my friends, and I saw my name wasn’t on the list.

It’s become Annie lore, what happened next.

My friends’ faces were filled with pity, and I think that’s what I hated most, though I’m probably projecting, because that’s definitely what I’d hate as the adult version of me. But back then, I was 12, and all I distinctly remember is going to the coach’s office and knocking on his door. I wanted him to tell me, to my face, why I hadn’t made the team.

He did.

“You’re too short and too skinny” were his exact words to me, further evidence I lived through the ’90s. Girls’ bodies were up for more debate back then. His words, even if true, stung, in part because he was a rather short guy himself, and in part because it meant skill had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t change my genetics. I am a short person (5’2″, though I definitely feel 5’6″) from short parents, but I’d thought, with practice, my height wouldn’t matter. Of course, in basketball, height does matter, though my brother and I could name for you every short basketball player we’d ever heard of, including Spud Webb (5’7″) and Muggsy Bogues (5’3″). And although it could be up for debate whether height matters in junior high sports, I’d asked for an answer, and I’d been given it. I nodded my head, thanked him for his time, and tried out for track a month or so later before breaking my toe and ending my athletic career forever.

I didn’t want this to become my Oprah moment. I did not want to be defined by a coach’s words to my seventh-grade self. But it was a pivotal moment, and it changed, at least partly, how I thought about myself. I still liked sports, still shot baskets on the hoop in our driveway, but I no longer dreamed about the WNBA. I turned my attention to academics, to writing, to wearing fake glasses and becoming the Barbara Walters of my generation. (I really loved Barbara Walters.) Still, though, in the deepest parts of myself resides a love of sports, basketball in particular.

That seventh-grade basketball coach didn’t necessarily change my life with his well-meaning (if condescending) words. I was never going to play for the WNBA. Even at 12, I bet in the back of my mind I knew that. But he temporarily robbed me of something I really loved, and I thought, wrongly, I had to find new things to love instead.

In high school, I threw myself into academics, joined the newspaper staff. I found new obsessions, and I’m grateful for them. They led me to future opportunities and set me on a career path. But in college, while I remained devoted to academic and journalistic pursuits, I tapped into my love of sports once again. I’d commandeer our dorm’s common area to watch FSU football. I joined a social club (the Christian college version of a sorority) and played intramural sports, albeit not always well, though I did discover a passion for flag football. I cheered from the stands during basketball season, impressing my friends with an actual knowledge of the sport I’d loved as a kid.

When March Madness rolled around, I passed out brackets to friends and made bets with my husband Jordan. We’d watch games together, and obsession once again reigned.

After college, that passion continued. Every March, Jordan dutifully sets up our family bracket competition through the ESPN app. We print our friends’ brackets and tape them to the wall in our living room.

The stakes are low, and the silliness is high, and it all reminds me of being 8 and 10 and 12 and wearing Grant Hill’s tennis shoes with pride.

Maybe you, too, had a defining Oprah moment in childhood. Maybe you were told your lips weren’t right for the flute, so you never picked up an instrument again.

Or maybe, like my mom, you did. You changed your story even after you thought there were expiration dates on what you could do. My mom started playing the guitar. I have a picture of her on my phone, in my aunt and uncle’s living room, strumming away, doing something I think she never thought she’d do.

I don’t play for the WNBA. I didn’t become a coach or a manager or a sportswriter, either. Instead, every year, I lead my staff in our March Madness bracket competition. I remind them, gently, to have fun, to do something that doesn’t matter, to try to participate in something they may never dominate.

Our childhood obsessions can save us. They can remind us of who we were before anything mattered, before everything felt heavy and hard. When life is overwhelming and challenging and our joy is stolen or hard to find, I think the things we once loved can bring us back, center us, make us whole.

Life is hard, but our innocent infatuations make it less so. That thing you loved in childhood? That sport or book series or TV show or board game? It can bring you back to yourself, if only for a moment, and a moment might be just what you need.

 Annie B. Jones is a writer, podcaster, and the owner of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in Thomasville, Georgia. She is the host of From the Front Porch — a weekly podcast about books, small business, and life in the South — and her work has been featured in Southern Living magazine.

From the book Ordinary Time: Lessons Learned While Staying Put by Annie B. Jones. Copyright © 2025 by Annie B. Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This article is featured in the November/December 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.