Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Waiting
I was stirring a too-sweet glass of sangria on a cliffside beach in Lisbon when my phone pinged. It was my childhood friend Lila, typing fast: “We just locked in our two big trips for next year – 10 days in Mexico and a road trip around Iceland. Everyone’s yelling at us to not wait to start trying for a baby. What would you do?” I brushed a grain of sand off my screen and looked over at my husband, who was passed out on our ratty towel, sunburn already pink on his shoulders. We’d been in this exact spot five years earlier, asking the same question.
We’d spent two years saving for two trips we’d talked about since our first date: a four-day Inca Trail hike to Machu Picchu, followed by a cherry blossom trip to Tokyo. We’d booked them 18 months out, scored a hard-to-get permit for the trail, and the second we hit send on the deposits, the questions started. My aunt cornered me at Christmas: “You’re 31, why would you wait? What if it takes forever to get pregnant?” My coworker who’d struggled with fertility told me I was being reckless to put it off. Even my nurse practitioner at my annual checkup raised an eyebrow when I said I wasn’t ready to start trying yet, that we wanted to get these trips done first.
I worried about it, too. I stayed up a couple of nights scrolling fertility forums, panicking that I was wasting my best fertile years for two weeks of walking around and taking pictures. But then I thought about my cousin, who got pregnant two weeks before her dream safari in South Africa. She spent the whole first trimester so sick she couldn’t leave her house, had to sell the trip for half what she paid for it, and still says it’s one of her biggest what-ifs. I thought about how if we went and I was already pregnant, I couldn’t eat the street food I’d been dying to try, couldn’t hike 10 miles a day, couldn’t even drink a glass of wine after a long day of walking. We’d saved for this for years, taken unpaid time off work to make it work. It felt wrong to risk that.
What I did first, before we left, was schedule a pre-conception checkup. I asked my doctor to run all the standard fertility tests for someone my age, check for any issues that would mean we shouldn’t wait. She said everything looked good, that waiting 18 months didn’t pose any extra risk for me, and that I shouldn’t let other people pressure me into a timeline that didn’t work for me. That’s the first thing I tell anyone who asks this question: don’t just go by what your cousin or your neighbor says. Book that appointment, get your specific situation checked out. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had irregular periods for years, or you have a family history of fertility issues, waiting 18 months for two trips might not make sense for you. You can adjust your plans, do one shorter trip now, start trying sooner. But if you’re healthy, no red flags, waiting isn’t reckless.
Our trips went exactly how we hoped they would. I hiked the whole Inca Trail without stopping every hour to catch my breath, ate every street corn and local specialty I wanted, drank pisco sours by the fire every night. In Tokyo, we walked 10 miles a day, hopped on overnight buses to Kyoto, ate raw sushi from the fish market, slept in a 6-foot capsule hotel because we thought it would be fun. We came home sunburnt, broke, and ready to start trying. I got pregnant on the third try, and our daughter is now four years old.
People say you can still travel after you have kids, and that’s true. We took her to Costa Rica last year, and it was fun. But it’s nothing like the trips we took before. Half the time I was changing a diaper on a plastic park bench, or stopping mid-hike because she needed a nap, or skipping the museum we wanted to see because she’d rather dig in the sand on the beach. It’s a different kind of fun, and I wouldn’t trade it, but it’s not the trip we would have had when we were child-free. If we’d rushed to start trying before our trips, I know I’d always be looking back wondering what it would have been like to go when we could fully enjoy it.
There’s also the myth that waiting a little while means you’re putting your career or your fun before your kid, which never made sense to me. Going into parenthood when you’ve checked the big, physical, you-only experiences off your list made me more present for my daughter’s first year. I didn’t lay awake at night regretting the trips I never took, or resenting that she’d disrupted our plans. We got to have our adventure, then we got to have her. It didn’t feel like we chose one over the other.
I texted Lila back this afternoon, after I got back from picking my daughter up from preschool. I told her to book that pre-conception appointment this week, talk to her doctor about her own numbers, not what everyone says over Thanksgiving dinner or on a mom group thread. If the doctor says you’re good to wait, go take the trips. It worked for me, it might not for everyone, but that’s okay. No timeline fits every person.
Tonight, we’re folding laundry and planning our first family camping trip next month. It’ll be messy, we’ll probably forget half the gear, and my daughter will spend the whole time covered in dirt. It’s our new normal, and it’s perfect. But I’m still glad I waited for those two trips first.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations