40 Chicken Nuggets Later, My Son and I Are Doing … Just Fine

“How much are the 40-piece nuggets?”

I felt guilty when the question rolled off my lips into the intercom in the McDonald’s drive-through, but it was too late. My son’s ears already perked up in the passenger seat.

“$11.99.”

My thirteen-year-old son and I were too late for the Breakfast Deluxe, and the question about the 40-piece McNuggets was a Freudian slip. It probably entered into my thoughts because a few weeks ago I recorded my son doing a 20-nugget challenge for his YouTube channel.

Now that I’d uttered the word 40 McNuggets … and he heard it there was no backing out.

“I want to do the 40-nugget challenge.”

I looked over at him and he was serious. He wanted to eat 40 nuggets all by himself!

An unexpected conversation

I never imagined these kinds of scenarios when I became a parent long ago. I though we might talk basketball, movies, video games, not about 40-nugget challenges. I didn’t think my teenage son would one day try to convince me to let him do a 40-McNugget challenge because he saw some kid doing it on their YouTube channel.

“Mom would kill me if I let you eat 40 nuggets.”

He persisted.

“I’ll blame the challenge on myself.”

I explained the meaning of the word accomplice and how you can be guilty of a crime and sent to prison when someone else does a crime if you happen to be around at the time it occurs.

“I’m the one buying the chicken nuggets.”

“No, no, no. I’m doing the 40-nugget challenge.”

He was adamant about doing this crazy thing.

I explained how Latarian Milton, a seven-year-old famous on YouTube for stealing his grandmother’s car, was in a Lyft car when someone held the driver at gunpoint and stole his wallet. Latarian, 18, drove the car away.

“Do you know where Latarian is now?”

“Jail.”

He gave up trying to persuade me. Logic won.

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“Let’s split the 40 nuggets,” I said.

Five minutes later

I ate the first 10 nuggets in five minutes, or in geographical distance, that was less than a half-mile after we left McDonald’s. We were on the way to do grocery shopping for my mom. The nuggets were like eating buttered popcorn at the movies, and I felt undaunted while opening up the second 10-piece box of chicken nuggets.

Okay, I felt wary about the task ahead. I’m 52.

“Try to notice how you’re body is feeling,” I said.

I shared with him about a documentary “Super Size Me” where the filmmaker ate nothing but McDonald’s for an entire month to see what effects it might have on his health and he gained 30 pounds, his blood pressure skyrocketed, his energy dropped, and he had chest pains. It also affected his sex life too.

“The guy said he could often feel the pains in his stomach while he was eating McDonald’s.”

“I don’t feel anything.”

I felt a tightening in my chest, a slight pain in my chest, and the aftertaste of grease on the roof of my tongue before I began to eat my eleventh nugget, but I rationalized that I’d eaten 12-piece nuggets many times at Chick-Fil-A.

I had no idea if I planned to go past twelve or just take it one nugget at a time. You didn’t ask, but you might want to know that I’m normally a more healthy eater (my downfall is chocolate and pizza) and this was our Cheat Day.

Breaking free from the nugget trap

While contemplating whether to eat my thirteenth nugget, I remembered an article by
Pam Winter , “Breaking Free From The Sugar Trap,” I read last night on Medium while I was eating brownies my wife and son made.

I dipped my thirteenth nugget into the bbq sauce on my lap at a red light.

“How are you feeling?” I asked my son.

He was six or seven nuggets ahead of me.

Maybe, on McNugget #18.

“I feel good. I have a stomach made of steel.”

His teeth sliced a nugget like a lawnmower cutting grass and I gave him my remaining nuggets after he played annoying Orange singing “Dumb Ways to Die” on my phone.

20 Nuggets down … 7 to go

As we pulled into the parking lot at Sam’s Club, my son powered down the final seven nuggets, and we both enjoyed a holiday pie. The sun was shining through the windshield and it was a beautiful sunny day, and my son had just eaten 27 McNuggets and I had consumed 13.

“How do you feel?” I asked him.

“I feel fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

I wasn’t sure if he was being honest, or this was his way of speaking like a teenager and saying one thing, but meaning the opposite. There is a literary term for how he was speaking. It’s called verbal irony, and I wondered if he wasn’t feeling very not so good and maybe in denial or was binge eating.

Then I had a flashback

Before we went grocery shopping for my mom, I had a flashback of going through a McDonald’s drive-through with a friend and his dad after basketball games during an undefeated season when I was twelve, a year younger than my son who is on the autism spectrum.

I laughed because my son will probably have a memory of this day with me. Maybe when he is 52, and he’s eating McDonald’s with his son.

I’m sure it will be a positive memory of eating nuggets while driving to Sam’s Club and his grandma’s house.

…

In her article, “I’m Not a Cool Writer and You Probably Aren’t Either,” Kelly Eden writes how she has read over and over how mommy bloggers and writing about parenting isn’t cool. I assume you can throw dads who write about parenting as uncool, especially those writing about eating 40 McNuggets with their son.

But I say let’s keep writing about parenting. Those who say writing about parenting is uncool have probably never had a child or don’t have a clue what it’s like to be a parent. They don’t know the joys, the heartaches, the struggles, the 40-nugget challenges.

Eden says this about good writing:

“I think the “cool” writers are the ones who write about what they’re passionate about; the ones who write interesting, well-researched pieces; the weird, original thinking ones.”

-Kelly Eden in Inspired Writer

I’m sorry for the lack of research in this article. Maybe, I should’ve mentioned that obesity has a prevalence rate of 19.3% among children and adolescents aged 2–19 and is higher among black (24.2%) and Hispanic (25.6%) children, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

But I hope you felt some of my passion in my writing and liked my weird, original thinking.

…

Thanks for reading my article and, no, I don’t plan to do the 40-Nugget challenge with my son again any time soon, but it was a fun to do.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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