Mrs. Boss

Last night Torsten and I had dinner with a friend/coworker of his, a great and close friend who lives several states away from us and works remotely for Torsten's company and who is in town just for the weekend. It also happens that Torsten serves as the friend's supervisor at work, which from Torsten's perspective, and I hope his friend's perspective as well, has absolutely no effect on their friendship.

In fact, even though I know that Torsten supervises several people at work, I had never really thought about that or processed it before. And it totally didn't occur to me at all during the dinner last night that Torsten is his friend's supervisor. Until the end of the meal, when we were saying goodnight and Torsten said something to his friend about how he should feel free to sleep in and come to the office late the next day.

At that moment, and this has nothing to do with the friend at all, but it clicked in my mind that wow, Torsten is a boss. I adore my own boss, and feel really lucky to have such a great boss, and we do have fun chats about non-work-related things, but I couldn't see ever becoming such great friends with him the way that Torsten is with this guy. And I know that part of is that Torsten and his friend were friends before they worked together, and also that Torsten is not at all a "boss" kind of person, in that he doesn't really do the whole hierarchy thing, but still. He's in charge of telling other people when they can take time off and chasing after them to fill out their time sheets.

I realize that I'm very young, and that I've never supervised anyone, and that eventually one day I most likely will supervise someone, and that's totally fine. And I also have realized that by being engaged to be married, I am agreeing to become someone's wife, and that someone isn't just the guy I love and know intimately, but also someone's employee, someone's boss, someone's son.

But still. Somehow I just never thought of myself as the boss's wife. Especially at age 24. I know people complain about how their bosses are so much younger than them. Well, Torsten is 6 years older than me. So that makes me a particularly young boss's wife.

I think of "the boss's wife" as an older lady, possibly in pearls and a Chanel suit, or maybe in seersucker pants and sensible shoes and a full face of makeup. I think of her as not working, as spending her days on the boards of charities and keeping the house running and potentially looking after grandchildren. I think of her as appearing on her husband's arm at company events, smiling demurely as he smokes a cigar and demonstrates what a family man he is.

This is a complete generality. In actual fact I know of no such boss and no such boss's wife. It's just a funky idea that I have in my head, clearly because I still have some old-fashioned gender stereotypes that I need to work through.

However, it's still weird. Me? A boss's wife? Impossible. Soon I'll be placing an order for my resort wear and starting up some sort of charitable foundation. Which actually, doesn't sound that bad. But not a role I would have expected to take on, in any form, this early in my life.