On a sunny morning in August 2022, emergency lights flashed and alarms blared through the halls of the Lussier Family Heritage Center as my fiancé Eddie and I mixed liters of gin, cucumber lime juice, and mint simple syrup together in the basement. We’d accidentally entered the building too early, over-eager to finish prepping for our pie-themed wedding, and we had to wait 45 minutes while someone from the parks department came to disengage the alarm. Nothing like a good crisis to start the day off right.

Exactly two years later, on our second wedding anniversary, we spent another early morning in what felt like a crisis. “My water just broke!” I told a Meriter midwife over the phone. “What do I do?” My due date was still nine days away, but I guess all those TikTok tricks — curb walking, eating dates, drinking raspberry leaf tea — worked their magic.

Having a baby was all very “first comes love, then comes marriage” of us, especially during a time when many folks in our generation are choosing not to have kids because of (gestures broadly at everything). But who wouldn’t want to raise a kiddo in Madison? Having a baby means you get to pull them around in a wagon at the farmers’ market instead of lugging your cheese and corn and maple syrup in a tote bag. It means ice skating together at Vilas Park, giving them one of those upside-down buckets to push around as they find their balance. It means holding your kid on your shoulders at La Fête de Marquette with oversized ear protectors squeezed against their ears, jamming out to a local band and holding a dripping ice cream cone.

We were ready to be parents. And I was so ready to not be pregnant anymore. I’d been vomiting constantly, regardless of how often someone mom-splained to me that nausea usually dies down after the first trimester. Once, a notification appeared on my phone during dinner, encouraging me to prepare an acai bowl as a healthy pregnancy meal. I was eating a single beef bouillon cube at the time. Which I still threw up.

Despite being a pescatarian before I got pregnant, I finally figured out my safe foods: beef, corn, beef, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and more beef. It was a Rosemary’s Baby situation, and this fetus craved flesh. Eddie and I eventually bought a quarter of a cow from Six Sons Farm in Sauk City, along with a chest freezer to store it in.

Over the phone, the midwife on call assured me that first pregnancies usually progressed slowly. “Call back at 10 a.m., or when your contractions are 3-4 minutes apart,” she told me. So, I downloaded a contraction timing app — which, in capitalist dystopian fashion, forced me to watch an ad every three contractions unless I upgraded to the paid version. I gave Eddie his anniversary gift. We walked down the street to Indie Coffee, where I gritted my teeth though a contraction, then watched an ad for an obscure movie streaming service.

By the time we got home, the contractions were only two minutes apart, and the midwife said it was time to go to the hospital. We happen to live a block away, so we walked. In the triage area, the midwife measured me at six centimeters — more than halfway to 10, when you can start pushing.

We’d learned all about those numbers — 10 centimeters, zero station, 100% effaced — in a birthing course in a traditional Swiss chalet in New Glarus a couple months earlier. I’d signed us up after I woke up sobbing from yet another labor nightmare, convinced that I was going to die in childbirth like a mother from a Victorian fairy tale. At the beginning of the class, the instructor asked us to draw a picture of our anxieties. I sketched an image of myself giving birth, with dead X’s where my eyes and the baby’s eyes should’ve been. Spending a day practicing partner support and pain relief techniques did help my anxiety. But mostly, I was so miserable by August that the prospect of eating ice cream again started to outweigh my fear of death.

Giving birth turned out to be exhilarating, if exhausting. Pushing out a baby felt like running the final stretch of the Madison Marathon, with a crowd of fans cheering me on — nurses, midwives, midwives in training, our doula, and Eddie, whose arm I bit into while emitting primal groans. The main difference was that instead of a medal and a beer, they handed me a slimy, screaming infant at the end.

It wasn’t until the next day that I was un-nauseous enough to eat ice cream. Eddie snuck a pint of mint chocolate chip into the birthing center, hiding it in a staff freezer. Scooping ice cream into my mouth while our new baby slept in my lap was blissful, and I cherish the photo Eddie snapped of the moment. Since then, I’ve enjoyed the many perks Madison has to offer for parents of young kiddos, far beyond the stuff I knew about as a childless adult: library story times, visits to the Madison Children’s Museum, free Kids in the Rotunda shows on Saturday mornings, walks to the Vilas Zoo.

Two years later, I’m poised for another Madison summer spent pregnant and nauseous. (I’m due in August again, because our family can apparently celebrate milestones only in that month.) But this time around, I’m so distracted parenting a toddler that I don’t have much time to get angsty about not being able to drink wine on the Capitol lawn during Concerts on the Square or order my favorite sundae from Michael’s Frozen Custard. I’m even a little excited for labor — that endorphin high is more addictive than I expected.

But mostly, I’m looking forward to the day Eddie and I can sit with our two Madisonian kiddos at the Union Terrace on a warm summer night, watching the sailboats float by on Lake Mendota as we lick Babcock ice cream from our waffle cones. Because happy moments like this are why people still make families, despite living in political dumpster fire, right? I understand why some folks don’t want to bring kids into a world that feels doomed to end in climate disaster or nuclear Armageddon. It’s hard knowing our children are likely going to inherit a planet that is worse off than the one we were born into. But I guess, once again, the prospect of eating ice cream outweighs my sense of doom. And when I look for glimmers of hope, I find them in raising smart, empathetic, politically engaged kids in a city like Madison. 

Mel Hammond is an author, mom, and ice cream lover. You can check out more of her work at melhammondbooks.com.