Cravings and Contractions: The food truck gelato that put me into labor

I wasn’t craving gelato on September 21st of last year. I was nine months pregnant, and my husband and I had just satisfied my hormonal need for salt and beef at the Snack Shack on Johnson Drive, a glorious greasy spoon that serves up smash burgers, onion rings and towering swirls of soft serve ice cream—a childhood favorite of mine. Ice cream, and its many varieties, was my stand-in drug of choice during that nine-month stretch of sobriety. But my belly, round and tight as a drum, was feeling particularly hefty and strained that day. I was having contractions. I just didn’t know it yet.

As we stepped out of Snack Shack and onto Beverly Lane, a massive food truck with a chalkboard sign reading “Gelato” sat parked in front of a brewery. 

Gelato might be one of my favorite desserts of all time—lemon gelato, specifically. Its icy-smooth texture makes me happily forgo the cream and eggs of its dessert brethren ice cream or French custard. It’s like velvet smashed with fruit or whipped with chocolate—cold, creamy, smooth and gloriously tart. Gelato is one of the best things in the world on a hot, late-summer day.

I had been pregnant and, many times, miserable, all summer. Truthfully, as excited as I was to be a mom, I was also scared. Something had shifted in me while on the brink of this new chapter of my life. If I was going to take on one of the biggest responsibilities that a human being can take on, I was going to combat that pressure by living unapologetically. Wild adventures, like bungee jumping out of an airplane, may not have been on the table while pregnant, but eating gelato, when it appeared almost like a mirage ever so fatefully in front of me, was.

My husband, with his body, mind and hormones relatively unchanged over the past nine months, was in no position to tell me no when we spied the gelato purveyor. We ran across the street to the truck, Andiamo Gelato, which I would later find out was run by a local Italian couple. I ordered two flavors: lemon pie and chocolate hazelnut. My husband ordered none. More for me.

Both heaping scoops were perfect. The last time I had gelato this good, my husband and I were in Italy, where he proposed on the edge of a cliffside city in Cinque Terre, atop ancient ruins where you could see the sea and beyond. 

Andiamo’s gelatos, each topped with a thin wafer cracker, appropriately reminiscent of the ones I had taken at communion many times before, were each sublime. My husband teased me for ordering two flavors, but the way the bright lemon zest and deeply roasted hazelnut tasted sent my spirits soaring. My belly was tight. I was full and happy.

Several hours later, I sat in my usual spot on the couch, one golden retriever curled at my side, the other being coddled by my husband. Suddenly, I felt what can only be described as a water balloon bursting in my womb. My baby boy was on his way.

After laboring for 12 hours, a healthy, chubby baby boy was born. Almost a year later, his cheeks are as plump and round as those two scoops of gelato that I like to believe gave him the final impetus to come into this world.  

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