Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Mom’s Real Perspective
The sun glinted off Lila’s still-peeling nose, leftover from our girls’ trip to the Algarve two weeks prior, as she stirred her oat latte hard enough to slosh foam over the edge of the cup. “So,” she said, wiping it up with a napkin, “my mom won’t stop bugging me. Should I really wait to get pregnant until after we do the ski trip and our 10-year anniversary trip to Mexico next year? Or am I just being stupid putting it off?”
I sat back and bit into my blueberry scone, because I’d asked myself the exact same question 10 years ago. My husband and I got married at 28, we’d booked an Inca Trail hike for six months after the wedding and a two-week trip to visit his cousin in Tokyo a year after that. All my aunts at the wedding reception cornered me to talk about fertility decline, my mom suggested we cancel the trips and just start trying, and I stayed up until 2 a.m. multiple nights scrolling medical blogs, wondering if I was making an irreversible mistake.
We went anyway. I still remember being 10 days into the Inca Trail, sick with a stomach bug that went through half our group, huddled under a poncho at 10,000 feet, too dizzy to stand. I kept thinking, what if I’d gotten pregnant before this trip? I’d be panicking about every cramp, every pill I took to settle my stomach, I’d have cut the trip short and missed the sunrise at Machu Picchu that I’d saved two years to see. As it was, I just got through it, drank extra Gatorade, and got to see the sunrise two days later. It wasn’t perfect, but it was ours, no strings attached.
That Tokyo trip was even better. We took a 12-hour overnight train from Tokyo to Hiroshima, drank cheap canned beer the whole ride, sat on the step between cars watching rice fields blur by, slept leaning against each other. We stayed out until 1 a.m. eating street food in Osaka, didn’t set an alarm for 11 straight days. If I’d been pregnant, I’d have been avoiding raw fish, skipping even the smallest sip of wine, worrying about whatever travel warning popped up on my phone that month. I’d have spent the whole trip anticipating the baby, instead of just being there.
We started trying right after we got back. I got pregnant on our first try, which I know is lucky, and that doesn’t happen for everyone. But that’s the first thing I told Lila: waiting for a couple of vacations doesn’t mean you’re doomed to infertility, that’s just the scary narrative people push on you. If you don’t have a known history of fertility issues, and you’re under 35, most doctors will tell you a 12 to 24 month wait isn’t a big deal. If you are over 35, or you know you have PCOS or endometriosis, you don’t have to choose between trips and a baby—just go get a pre-conception checkup first, ask your doctor what they recommend for your specific case. When my cousin was 37 and wanted to take a two-week safari before trying, her doctor told her to go, just start trying as soon as she got back, and that worked for her.
The second thing no one talks about is that vacations look really different once you have a kid. I love my son more than anything, but our last family vacation to the beach was 6 a.m. wake-ups for sandcastles, packing 12 different snacks, stopping every 45 minutes on the drive for potty breaks. We did a kid-free weekend last month when he stayed at my mom’s, and we still checked our phones three times an hour to make sure he wasn’t sick or hurt. It’s not bad, it’s just different. You don’t get that completely unselfconscious, no-responsibility vacation again for a really long time, if ever. Why skip that if you can have it?
I gave Lila three concrete things to work through, no vague “follow your heart” nonsense. First, if the trips are already booked and paid for, don’t cancel them just to please other people. Cancellation fees are bad enough, but the regret of skipping a trip you’ve been looking forward to for years will stick with you longer than any extra month of trying. Second, if you’re nervous about waiting, book that pre-conception appointment now. It’s a $50 copay, takes 20 minutes, and you can leave with a clear answer from someone who knows your health, instead of panicking over what your aunt or a TikTok says. Third, if you and your partner disagree, compromise. If he’s ready to start trying now and you want to take the trips, do one trip this year, start trying after. You don’t have to do all or nothing.
Lila texted me last week, after she talked to her OB and her husband. She’s keeping both trips. She’ll start trying after Mexico next fall. She still has bad days where she scrolls fertility content and panics that she’s waiting too long. I don’t have a guarantee for her. I can’t tell her it’ll work out the first try, like it did for me, or that she won’t end up needing fertility treatment down the line. No one can give you that guarantee, no matter when you start trying. What I do know is, if she ends up starting her family next year, she’ll have those two trips locked in her memory—sun on the slopes, margaritas on the beach at sunset, no one needing her but each other. That’s something you can’t get back once you’re a parent. And that, to me, is worth the wait.
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