I Don’t Mean to Offend You…
Last week we went to Yorkshire to spend some time with my in-laws. My husband’s family live all the way over on the other side of the world–Australia–so we don’t get to see them often. I’ve only met them live and in-person once before.
I’m a shy person. You probably can’t tell that by reading this blog, but I am. So spending time with anyone I don’t know extremely well is nerve racking for me. I spend a lot of time not knowing what to do and worrying. I think I did all right last week though. The nervousness factor was only about a 6 on a scale from 1 to 10. A few times it even went down to an amazingly un-nervous 4.
Anyway, I don’t drink alcohol or coffee or tea and my in-laws know this, of course. For some reason my father-in-law seems to think that he can’t mention the words coffee or tea in front of me. He also seems to think that he can’t mention any alcoholic drinks. He would say something like, “That book stores sells great coffee.” Then he would turn to me and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, you don’t drink coffee.”
I never realized that simply talking about beverages could cause so many I’m-sorrys and I-don’t-mean-to-offend-yous. You can only imagine the number of apologies that occurred when it came to actually drinking them.
