Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Having a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Waiting
The ceramic mug of lavender latte in front of Lila was sweating through a paper napkin onto the chipped wooden table when she pushed her phone across to me. Two screenshots glowed: one of a white-sand Tulum resort with a cliffside plunge pool, the other of a cozy A-frame ski cabin tucked into Vermont pines. “We’ve had these trips planned for eight months,” she said, stirring her drink so hard the foam sloshed over the edge. “Our families keep saying we should just cancel them and start trying for a baby now. But I want these trips. Is it stupid to wait?”
I told her I’d sat exactly where she was five years ago. My husband and I had two trips locked in: a 10-year college reunion trip to Cabo San Lucas that half my graduating class was attending, and a 10-day backpacking trip through the Rockies that we’d planned with our best couple friends for a full year. I was 32, and every other comment from extended family at that point was some version of “don’t wait too long, your clock’s ticking.” My mom kept saying we could take trips after the baby came. My cousin, who had two kids under four at the time, pulled me aside at a barbecue and said, “Go. You won’t get a week where you don’t have to wake up to someone screaming for a bottle for at least a decade. Go now.”
I went back and forth for weeks. I’d lie awake at night scrolling fertility forums, panicking that waiting a whole year would ruin my chances. Then I’d look at the non-refundable deposit we’d put down for the cabin, and the group chat where my college friends were planning late-night bonfires, and I’d think: why am I rushing this? We decided to wait. We took both trips. I can still remember the Cabo trip: we stayed up until 2 a.m. on the beach drinking cheap margaritas, talking about what we thought parenthood would be, no alarms, no packing lists for tiny people, no need to cut the night short because someone had an early bedtime. On the Rockies trip, I sprained my ankle three miles into our first big hike, and we just turned around, went back to the cabin, ordered a greasy pepperoni pizza from the only place in town that delivered, and watched old 90s movies the rest of the afternoon. No one needed us. No one was depending on us for every little thing. It was quiet, and it was ours.
When we got back, we started trying. I got pregnant three months later, and our daughter is four now. What I tell people now when they ask this question is that there’s no one right answer, but there are concrete things to work through that no one talks about.
First, get clear on your own health risk from your actual doctor, not TikTok or your great aunt at Thanksgiving. If you’re under 35 with no known fertility issues, most OBs will tell you that waiting 6 to 18 months for a couple of trips doesn’t meaningfully change your chances of having a healthy baby. If you’re over 35 or have a history of irregular cycles, PCOS, or other fertility concerns, that’s a different conversation – and that’s a conversation you should have with your provider, not a random relative. Book a 15-minute pre-conception check-in, ask them point-blank what waiting a year would mean for you, and go from there.
Second, count what you’ve already put into those trips. If you’ve put down thousands in non-refundable deposits, or this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip with a group of people you won’t get to travel with again (like that 10-year reunion I went on – that group hasn’t all been in the same place since), that’s a solid reason to wait. If the trips are just something you added to your list because you saw other people check them off before having kids, and you don’t actually care that much about going, don’t put your timeline on hold for them. I have a friend who put off starting her family for two years to check off three big international trips she saw influencers post, and by the time she started trying, she was so stressed about “waiting too long” that she could barely enjoy the trips anyway. She told me later she would’ve rather just started trying and skipped the fancy trips.
Third, stop feeling guilty for wanting time that’s just yours. A lot of people act like wanting a couple of trips before you have a baby is selfish, but that’s garbage. Those trips don’t take away from your future kid – they give you and your partner shared memories that you can lean on when the newborn days are exhausting, when you’re both up at 3 a.m. changing a sick baby and wondering what you got yourselves into. I pull up that photo of us covered in pizza grease on the cabin couch all the time when we’re tired. It reminds me that we were people before we were mom and dad, and that matters.
Lila left the coffee shop that day still a little torn, but she called me a week later and said they’d kept the trips booked. They’re going in spring, then they’ll start trying. I don’t know how it’ll go for her. There’s no perfect ending to this question. I know people who waited and ended up struggling with fertility, and that’s incredibly hard, and that’s a risk you have to weigh. I know people who didn’t wait, skipped the trips, and never missed them, and they’re just as happy.
For me, it was the right call. Those trips didn’t make me a better mom, but they gave me something that’s mine, that I don’t have to share with anyone. Right now, my daughter is across the room building a lopsided block tower, yelling for me to come look at it, and I’m about to go do that. I don’t regret a single day I waited. And if Lila’s choice works out differently for her, that’s okay too. There’s no one right timeline that fits everyone.
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