Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
I’m wiping oat milk foam off my 18-month-old’s sticky chin when Lila leans across the wobbly café table and asks the question she’s been circling around in texts for three weeks. “Should I wait to get pregnant after we do these two trips we already booked? Everyone says I’m being stupid putting vacations before a baby, but I don’t know.” I wipe my hand on my jeans, shift the diaper bag that’s digging into my ankle, and think back to when I asked myself the exact same question three years ago.
My husband and I had been talking about trying for a baby for six months when we booked our two-week trip to Portugal. We’d saved for it for three years, through overtime shifts and skipping weekly takeout, and I’d already negotiated three weeks of unpaid time off at my job, since it was the only gap our team had all year. Three months after we got back from Portugal, we also had a long-planned trip to Florida to visit my husband’s grandma, who’d just turned 90 and wanted all the grandkids together one last time. My sister kept calling me, saying I was being reckless, that fertility doesn’t wait and I shouldn’t delay. My coworker who’d had her first baby at 34 told me to go, that I’d never have another trip alone with my husband again anyway. I went back and forth for weeks, lying awake at night scrolling fertility forums until my eyes burned.
I ended up calling my obgyn and asking for a 15-minute check-in, just to go over my personal history. I was 29, had regular cycles, no known fertility issues, so she said waiting six or seven months for two trips wasn’t going to make any meaningful difference for me. That’s when I decided to wait. We went to Portugal, ate pastéis de nata at 10pm every night, wandered the Alfama district until our feet ached, and never once set an alarm. We napped on a beach in the Algarve for three hours one afternoon, got lost on back roads in the north, and made up after a stupid fight about directions over a cheap bottle of vinho verde. There was no one asking anything of us, no schedules to keep, just us. When we got back, we went to Florida, sat with grandma on her porch for three days, ate key lime pie every day, and took hundreds of photos that still hang on our fridge. Then we started trying.
It didn’t happen right away. I got pregnant on the third cycle, and that second month I was convinced I’d made the worst mistake of my life. I cried to my husband one night, saying I’d ruined our chance because I wanted pastries in Portugal. But that stress didn’t last, and when our daughter was born, I started to realize what I’d actually gotten out of waiting. The first six months were brutal. We were both exhausted, we snapped at each other over stupid things like who forgot to buy more diapers, we went a whole month without having a conversation that wasn’t about nap times or feedings. But there were nights, like that 2am wake up where we both sat on the nursery floor crying because our daughter wouldn’t stop fussing, and we ended up laughing when we remembered getting lost in Lisbon and stumbling into that 24-hour café that gave us free pastries just because we looked tired. That shared memory, that time when we were just us and not just mom and dad, pulled us through more hard nights than I can count.
What I tell people now when they ask this question isn’t that you should always wait, or that you should never wait. It’s three small, concrete things you can do to decide for yourself. First, book a quick check-in with your obgyn, and ask for your personal risk, not a generic answer. If you’re 37, or you have PCOS, or you’ve had issues with fertility in the past, waiting a year might not be the right call for you. But if you’re healthy, have no known issues, and your trips are less than a year out, most of the time it’s not the big risk people make it out to be. Second, write down two short lists: one that says what I’ll regret if I wait, and one that says what I’ll regret if I don’t go. Don’t do a fancy pros and cons list, just write down the first things that come to mind. For me, I wrote “I’ll regret never getting that big trip with just my husband” on the don’t go side, and “I’ll be stressed for a few months if it takes longer” on the wait side. That made the choice really clear. Third, if you do decide to wait, start the small prep work now. Take your prenatal vitamins, cut back on whatever you’re planning to cut back on for pregnancy, so you’re ready to go as soon as you get home. You don’t have to put your whole baby plan on pause just because you’re going on a trip.
Lila left the café that day, booked her check-in with the obgyn, and decided to go on both her Costa Rica trip for her 30th and her cousin’s wedding in Ireland this fall. She texted me last week a photo of herself covered in volcanic mud, grinning from ear to ear, and said she couldn’t imagine missing this. She’ll start trying when she gets back. We don’t know how it’s going to go. She might get pregnant the first cycle, she might struggle for a year, there’s no way to know for sure. But what I know is, whatever happens, she won’t spend the rest of her life wondering what it would have been like to walk through the rainforest with her best friend, or dance at her cousin’s wedding without a newborn strapped to her chest. The guilt people throw at you for wanting a little time for yourself before baby doesn’t matter as much as the choice that feels right for you.
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