Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Having a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From Waiting
Last month, I met my friend Lila at the corner coffee shop we’ve been going to for 10 years. The table by the window still has a faint sticky ring from the maple syrup pancake I spilled there last winter, and she slid her phone across it, scrolling through photos of her and her husband’s recent trip to Portugal. They’d already checked off a week in Costa Rica that spring, the two big vacations they’d saved for and talked about nonstop through the first two years of their marriage. When she got to a photo of them drinking wine on a cliff at sunset, she locked her phone and twisted her engagement ring around her finger. “Everyone keeps asking when we’re going to start trying for a baby,” she said. “We did the two vacations we wanted. But I still want to take that fall trip to Maine I’ve been dreaming of since I was a kid. Is it crazy to wait longer after we already had our two trips? Should I just go for it now?”
I get that question all the time, actually, from friends in their late 20s and early 30s. They plan the big trips they don’t think they’ll take once they have kids, check them off the list, then suddenly feel stuck between the pressure to start a family and the quiet pull to hold onto that light, unstructured freedom a little longer. I was there five years ago. My husband and I took our two dream trips right after we got married: a two-week hiking trip through the Canadian Rockies, where we woke up at 5 a.m. to see the sun hit the glaciers, and a week in Cabo San Lucas to visit my grandma before her mobility got too bad. When we got home, I was folding salt-stained swimsuits in our laundry room, sand sifting out through the fabric onto the rug, when my husband leaned against the doorframe and asked if I wanted to call the doctor to schedule my pre-pregnancy checkup. I started crying right there, over a pile of swimsuits. I didn’t want to put the trips away. I didn’t want to stop being the two people who could book a last-minute hotel and leave town at 2 p.m. on a Friday just because we felt like it.
Most people will give you one of two extreme answers to this question. Either “you can travel with kids, don’t wait, don’t waste your fertility” or “enjoy every minute you can, you’ll never get this freedom again”. Neither helped me when I was stuck. Both were true, but neither told me what to do the day after I got home from my second vacation, standing in my laundry room with sand on my socks.
What I ended up doing was really simple, and it’s the same thing I told Lila. First, I wrote down the actual reason I wanted to wait, not just a vague feeling. I crossed out “I want more vacations” and got specific: I wanted to take the trip to Japan we’d been planning since college, and I was scared that having a baby would mean I’d never get to travel as just me and my husband on a big trip like that again. That was a real reason, not just restlessness. Then I made a clear timeline: we’d go the following spring, then schedule that pre-pregnancy appointment as soon as we got home. No more open-ended putting it off after that.
If you’re stuck after checking off your couple of vacations, this is the first concrete step you can take: name your actual reason for waiting, don’t just go with the vague feeling that you’re not ready yet. If it’s paying off the credit card from your last two trips, that’s a solid reason to wait 12 months to get your finances stable before you start trying. If it’s that you still don’t feel ready to be a parent, and the vacations just reminded you how much you love your current routine, that’s also a real reason to wait. If it’s just that you’re scared you’ll never travel again once you have a baby, that’s normal, but you don’t need to wait three more years for another big trip to feel okay about starting.
The second concrete step I recommend is tied to that fertility fear everyone mentions. If you’re 35 or older, don’t just guess about how long you can wait. After you get home from your last planned vacation, book a 30-minute pre-pregnancy checkup with your OB. They can do a simple blood test to check your egg reserve and answer your questions about what timeline makes sense for you. It takes an afternoon, and it takes the guesswork out of your decision, instead of wondering for a year if you’re making the wrong choice.
I went to Japan, came home, got pregnant three months later, and I never once regretted waiting that 18 months after our first two vacations. I also didn’t end up giving up travel once my daughter was born. When she was six months old, we took a weekend trip to the lake an hour from our house, the same trip we used to take every year before kids. It was messier: we forgot her diaper cream, she spit up on my favorite sweater, and we only got one hour of sitting by the water instead of the whole afternoon. But we still got ice cream from the same shop we went to before, and we still watched the sunset over the water. That part didn’t go away. When she turned three, we brought her and my mom along on a second trip to Kyoto, and it was different, but it was still good.
Last week, Lila texted me a photo from Maine. She and her husband are sitting on a picnic table, covered in lobster roll crumbs, with a mountain of red and orange maple leaves behind them. She added a text that said: “Appointment is scheduled for November. No guilt.” I texted back a heart emoji. I don’t know if she’ll get pregnant right away, or if they’ll decide to take one more small trip next spring and push the appointment back. That’s okay.
There’s no perfect answer to this question. No one can tell you that you have to start trying the second you get home from your last planned vacation, and no one can tell you that you have to keep waiting to check every trip off your bucket list before you’re allowed to start a family. The sand from our first Cabo trip still comes out of our laundry room rug every once in a while, when I’m folding sheets. I never bothered to scrub it all out. It’s a reminder that the parts of your life you love don’t disappear when you add a baby to it. They just change shape. And if you want to hold onto the version you have right now for a little longer, that’s okay too.
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