10/17/2026
🥺❤️
My wife is 38 years old and eats chicken nuggets for dinner a couple of nights a week. I keep the freezer stocked with them myself.
If you think that is childish, I used to think so too. I was wrong about a lot more than chicken.
Our first year together, we went out to a barbecue place with some of my buddies. When the server came around, she quietly asked if she could get the chicken tenders off the kids menu. One of my friends said, "What are you, 6?" The whole table laughed.
I laughed too.
She laughed along with us, ordered the tenders anyway, and did not say much for the rest of the night. I did not think twice about it.
A few weeks later she had one of those days. The kind where she walks in, sets her keys down too carefully, and you can tell the whole world got too loud on her somewhere between work and the driveway. I wanted to fix it, so I made the best dinner I knew how to make. Steak and potatoes, the whole production. I set it in front of her like I had solved something.
She took 2 bites, put her fork down, and said, "I'm so sorry. I can't."
Around 10 that night I heard the toaster oven. She was standing in the kitchen in my hoodie, laying frozen nuggets out on the tray in perfect rows. When they came out, she put them on a paper towel and sorted them before she ate a single one. The round ones in one pile. The long ones in another. She saved the ones that looked even a little bit like boots for last.
I asked her about the boots. I made sure there was nothing in my voice this time.
She was quiet for a while. Then she told me.
"My dad worked doubles. Some nights he'd swing through McDonald's on his way home and bring back nuggets for me and my sisters. It was usually 11 o'clock and they were cold by then. We'd eat them on the living room floor with him while he fell asleep in his chair. That was the only time we really had him."
"We each had a shape. My middle sister always got the bells. My little sister got the circles. I always got the boots."
"The rest of the week I made dinner. I was 9. Stepmoms came and went. Dad's shifts changed. Frozen nuggets were the only thing I knew how to make that came out right every single time. 400 degrees, 12 minutes. Same color. Same crunch. The box in the freezer never left."
Then she said the thing she had never said out loud.
"When everything is too much, I don't want something good. I want something that has never once surprised me."
And then, smaller: "I'm 25 years old and I still eat like that little girl, and I'm so embarrassed."
I went and looked it up after she fell asleep, because I could not stop thinking about those boots.
McDonald's makes Chicken McNuggets in exactly 4 shapes. The bell, the ball, the boot, and the bone. Every one is the same width and cut by the same rolling cutter, so they cook the same way at every restaurant in the country. When somebody asked the company why only 4, they said 3 would have been too few and 5 would have been, and I am quoting a corporation here, "wacky."
A whole company spent decades making sure a chicken nugget could never surprise you. My wife figured out why that matters when she was 9 years old, standing on a step stool in front of a toaster oven, feeding her sisters.
That food was never childish. It was the one thing in that house that kept its promise.
So I changed some things.
The freezer never runs out. On her bad days, she walks in and the toaster oven is already going. I never say "again?" I never say "are you sure you don't want real food?" When the plate comes out, all the boots are on her side.
And when we go out now and she asks for the tenders, and sometimes I order them too. Two grown adults eating off the kids menu at a steakhouse. Nobody has had a single thing to say to a 6'5" man eating chicken tenders. That buddy from the barbecue place has not said a word about it since, either.
Last month she had a brutal week. Friday night she came home, saw the plate on the counter, and started laughing and crying at the same time. I had sorted them for her. Boots on top.
If you have a food you go back to when the world is too loud, hear this from somebody.
It was never childish. It was the dinner that kept a little girl standing when nobody else was there to make one. You can eat it as a grown woman without apologizing to anybody.
And if you love a woman like that, keep the freezer full. Never say "again." Give her the boots.
She has been called a picky eater her whole life by people who always knew what was for dinner.
A lot of neurodivergent women who grew up in houses where nothing stayed the same carry that little girl with them into every grown-up day. Sameness feels like safety, and every surprise lands in the body like a threat. My wife spent years ashamed of what she needed to feel steady.
I wrote The Neurodivergent's Guide to Submission for her and every woman like her. It explains why your body craves the things that never change, and why letting one steady person hold the plan can finally make the world stop surprising you.
kanecross.com/neurosub
