I must have been around nine or ten, reading an article in the yearly Reader’s Digest Youth Anthology about Marie Curie. You know, the famous scientist? First woman to receive a Nobel Prize? First woman to receive multiple Nobel Prizes, in fact? Only person ever to get a Nobel Prize in two different fields? Yeah, her. So inspiring, such a role model.
There’s one sentence that stuck out to me so much I still remember it forty-odd years later. The article was talking about Mme Curie’s life, and it described how she would get ready for her day at the research lab, making sure her two little girls were looked after, putting a stew on the back burner for their dinner. A little while later, she would be in the lab, and, so the article said, “adjusted the flame of her Bunsen burner with the same care that she had used for the flame of the stew pot that morning…”
Ah, thought little pig-tailed nine-year-old me, that’s how it’s done. If a girl wants to be a famous scientist and do life-changing work, she has to make sure that the beef stew for her family back in her kitchen is as well-regulated as the flame of the Bunsen burner in her lab.
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This morning, as I was thinking about this in the course of my never-ending struggle with running the multiple tracks of my life, I came up with a phrase to describe this idea: the Parallel Lives Fallacy. It’s the idea that if you only work hard enough, you can, in fact, excel at multiple different roles—you can lead Parallel Lives. Like Marie Curie, who so admirably regulated the flames of her role of housewife and mother and Nobel-Prize-winning scientist.
Parallel Lives: in one life, you’re a full-time award-winning scientist; in another, you’re an excellent housewife and devoted mother (also full-time). Maybe you even add a third one, where you’re a dedicated volunteer and full-time caregiver to your ailing parents. Or, wait, you could be an artist, as well! Write novels, or make pottery to sell at the market, or paint pictures to go in exhibitions!
Full-time jobs, all of them. Several full-time jobs. Wait—full-time. Several full-times. Nothing wrong with that concept, is there? It’s just like, when your plate is full, you can obviously go back to the buffet with it and start loading it up with another plateful’s worth of food, right? Several platefuls.
Yes, I know the image that brings up. “On top of spaghetti / all covered in cheese, / I lost my poor meatball / when somebody sneezed. / It rolled off the table, / it rolled on the floor, / and then my poor meatball / rolled out of the door…”
Marie Curie was amazing. She pulled off the Parallel Lives stunt to admiration, without losing a single meatball, from what I can tell. However, her work eventually killed her, because she didn’t know to protect herself from the fascinating stuff she had discovered. It also killed her daughter, Irène (another Nobel Prize winning scientist working with radiation). Apparently (according to Wikipedia), Marie Curie’s papers—including her cookbooks!—even more than a hundred years later have such a high level of radioactive contamination that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes and are considered too hazardous to handle without protective equipment.
I can’t help but wonder about the state of that stew on the carefully regulated burner—was that contaminated, too?
The Parallel Lives Fallacy is a fallacy. Because unless you’re Marie Curie (and I sure am not), you just can’t pull it off without losing at least one or two of your meatballs off that plate. Which is a patent waste of good meatballs (I have a recipe, if you’re interested). You get one plate, and it only holds one plateful of food. There is only one day in a day, only twenty-four hours in twenty-four hours, and only space for one full-time job in your full time.
The problem with Marie Curie’s Bunsen burner is not that we admire her for her balancing act of flame-regulation. It’s that we (okay, that I) instantly think that that’s the only way to do it, the only way to be a successful and worthy person. That we succumb to the Parallel Lives Fallacy.
The reality is that one plateful of food is enough. One day in a day, one life in a life. If you try to stack more on top, the meatballs go rolling under a bush, and, contrary to the song lyrics, don’t grow into a meatball tree but just attract maggots and rats. At least in my life they do.
So I’m going to turn my back on that Parallel Lives Fallacy. I’m going to try to choose more carefully what I want on my plate, because I really enjoy meatballs and don’t want them rolling under a bush on me. I also like spaghetti noodles, and tomato sauce, and a lovely green salad, and maybe some cooked carrots or a piece of garlic bread… I want to have room for them all on my one plate, so I can enjoy the whole meal, savour it and get nourishment from it. One plate, one plateful.
Oh, but you know what? A little secret: You get dessert. In a separate little glass dish. You don’t have to pile it onto your plate with the meatballs. Make of that what you will.
Life, the Universe, and Marie Curie’s Bunsen Burner. One life to live is enough.
