Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? Honest Insight From a Parent Who Chose to Wait
I’m wiping sand off my kitchen counter three days after getting home from our annual family beach trip, and my phone pings. It’s the 15-year-old college friend group chat, and Lila just typed: “Okay, be honest. Is it crazy that I want to take one more European trip before we start trying? Everyone keeps saying we’re running out of time.” I pause, my wipe hovering over a crumb of granola bar, because that’s exactly the question I asked five years ago, when my husband and I were staring down two booked vacations and a calendar full of people’s unsolicited opinions about our timeline.
Back then, we were 29, all our close friends had started having kids in the last two years, my mom had taken to leaving parenting magazines on my porch when she visited, and our pre-trying checkup with the ob-gyn ended with a line that stuck with me: “Biology doesn’t wait, even if your travel plans do.” We’d put down a non-refundable $800 deposit on a two-week trip to Japan, a trip we’d been saving for since our wedding three years prior, and we’d already bought non-refundable tickets to a long weekend in New York to see the band we’d loved since high school. If we started trying right away, we’d either have to cancel both trips (and lose all that money, all that years-long planning) or risk traveling while sick with first-trimester morning sickness, or juggling a newborn right after delivery. Everyone we told had an opinion: my sister said we were being selfish, my cousin who’d struggled with infertility said we were being reckless, even the barista at our regular coffee shop shook her head when we mentioned it.
We decided to wait 10 months, until after both trips. I don’t think I’ve ever been as pressured to change a decision as I was then, but we stuck to it. The New York trip was messy and perfect: we stayed in a $150-a-night Airbnb with a lumpy mattress in Brooklyn, walked 8 miles a day just popping into random used book stores and vintage shops, ate everything-bagels at 10am sitting on a fire escape, stayed up until 1am talking about nothing, no alarms set for the next day, no one to feed but us. The Japan trip was even better: we hiked Fushimi Inari at 6am before the crowds showed up, got lost for two hours in a residential neighborhood of Tokyo, stumbled into a tiny family-run sushi place that didn’t have an English menu and just pointed at what we wanted, sat in an outdoor onsen in Kyoto under cherry blossoms, and I didn’t check a single parenting blog or answer a single question about when we’d have kids the whole two weeks.
Then we got home, I stopped my birth control, and we started trying. I got pregnant on the third try, our daughter was born a little over a year after we got back from Japan, and she’s four now. The first 18 months of her life were a lot harder than I expected: I had undiagnosed postpartum anxiety, I averaged three hours of broken sleep a night for a full year, there were weeks I didn’t change out of my sweatpants. But there was never a single day I lay awake wishing we’d skipped those trips to start trying earlier.
Here’s what people don’t tell you when they’re pressuring you to start trying right away: the first few years of parenthood take every bit of energy you have, and a little bit more. If you go into it already feeling like you missed out on the thing that mattered most to you before kids, that quiet regret can hang around, even when you love your kid more than anything. I know couples who started trying right away and never cared about the trips they missed, and that works for them. But I also know a lot of new parents who are already stretched thin, and they carry that “what if” with them that makes it harder to show up for their kid and each other.
If you’re asking this question right now, there are a few concrete things I’d tell you to do, instead of just listening to everyone’s opinions. First, if you’re over 35 or have known fertility issues, go get a baseline ovarian reserve test done before you decide. It’s a simple blood test, it’ll give you a real idea of how much time you can safely wait, instead of just going off generic scary stats. Second, write down what the trips actually are: are these trips you can’t take with a young kid? Long-haul international trips, multi-day hiking trips, trips that you saved for years for that you can’t reschedule? If you’re just waiting for another random beach trip you can take when your kid is 5, that’s a different call than waiting for a trip that won’t be possible for a decade. Third, ask your partner straight out: are we waiting because we want these trips, or are we waiting because we’re scared to have kids? Be honest about the answer, because that’s the thing that matters most, not what your aunt says at Thanksgiving.
I typed that all into the group chat, more or less, after I finished wiping the sand off the counter. I didn’t tell Lila what to do. I told her what worked for me, and what the actual tradeoffs are. Some days, I look at my daughter running around the playground and I think about how lucky I got that everything worked out exactly the way it did. Other days, I think about how if it hadn’t worked out, I still would have had those two trips with my husband, that I still wouldn’t have regretted it. There’s no perfect answer, right? The only wrong answer is the one that you didn’t choose for yourself.
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