Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? Tips for deciding what’s right for you
I was wiping crusted sand off my favorite reusable coffee mug three weeks after we got home from our second back-to-back vacation, when my best friend texted: “So… are you starting to try now, or did you decide to wait another year?” I stared at the text for a minute, twisting the chipped ceramic handle, because that question had been hanging over me for the past 18 months, ever since we booked our two big trips before even talking seriously about getting pregnant.
Two years ago, we hit that milestone everyone talks about: all our college friends started posting newborn photos, our moms started asking about grandkids at every Sunday dinner, and our lease was up on our little apartment, so we had all this space to think about what came next. We’d always said we wanted to do two big trips before kids: the multi-week hike through Patagonia we’d daydreamed about since our first date camping, and a lazy two-week beach trip where we didn’t hike anything more strenuous than a sand dune. When we realized we could stretch a summer sabbatical (I’m a 4th grade teacher, so my schedule let me take extra time off, and my husband could take an unpaid leave from his project management role), we booked both back to back.
Almost immediately, people had opinions. A distant cousin commented on my Instagram post of our plane tickets that “fertility doesn’t wait for vacation photos.” My aunt pulled me aside at a wedding and asked if we were sure we weren’t just putting off parenthood because we were scared. I started scrolling TikTok at 10pm every night, reading all the stories of people who waited and struggled with infertility, and I got so worked up I packed a pregnancy test in my hiking pack for Patagonia, just in case I was late that month.
When the test came back negative, I sat on a flat rock overlooking Perito Moreno Glacier, ate a stale energy bar, and cried a little. I wasn’t sad I wasn’t pregnant. I was tired of feeling like I had to choose between checking these two trips off our bucket list and starting the family we wanted. I called my mom that night, after we got back to our mountain refugio, and she said something that stuck: “No one asks you what you’ll regret more when you’re 70. They just tell you what they think you should regret.”
After that, I stopped asking other people what I should do, and I started working through our choice with three small, concrete steps that took a lot of the pressure off. First, I scheduled an appointment with my OB before we left, to get actual facts instead of generic social media stats. I’m 33, so we did a basic ovarian reserve test, talked about my cycle history, and she told me that waiting 18 months to start trying wasn’t a risky choice for me, and that if we did struggle to conceive down the line, there were options that would still work for us. That alone cut through so much of the noise I’d been internalizing—instead of panicking about one-size-fits-all age stats, I had a clear answer for my own body.
Second, my husband and I sat down at a street taco truck after our first big Patagonia hike and wrote out two short lists: what would realistically happen if we waited, and what would happen if we canceled the trips and started trying now. What we found was that all the bad outcomes of waiting were other people’s fears. The good outcomes were ours: we got to reset from four years of back-to-back stressful work, where I was grading papers until 9pm every night and he was traveling for work two weeks out of every month. We didn’t want to jump straight from years of burnout into the most physically and emotionally demanding life change you can make. I’d seen that with my sister, who got pregnant right after we finished college, never took more than a week off in five years, and her postpartum anxiety was so bad she ended up taking a three-month medical leave that she thinks could’ve been avoided if she’d had a little time to rest first.
Third, we talked through what we’d do if we got pregnant accidentally on vacation, instead of just crossing that bridge when we got to it. We both decided that if it happened, we’d be thrilled, no regrets. So waiting wasn’t a hard “not now forever,” it was just a “we want to do these trips first, and if it happens sooner, that’s okay too.” That took the guilt out of the choice entirely.
Now we’re home. I’m back in my classroom prepping for the new school year, and we started trying last week. Some days I still wake up anxious, wondering what if it takes two years, what if we should’ve started sooner. Other days, I open my junk drawer and find the smooth sea glass I picked up on our last beach day, or the sticker we got from that Patagonia refugio stuck to my water bottle, and I remember how good that time was. We slept in until 9am every day for three months. We ate ice cream for breakfast twice. We didn’t answer any work emails for 12 weeks. That reset isn’t something we could’ve gotten after a baby, not for a long, long time.
I don’t know what the next year will bring. We might get a positive test next month, or we might end up needing fertility treatment, or we might even decide we want one more small trip before we dive into parenthood. Waiting to start trying after our two vacations wasn’t the right choice for everyone, but it was the right choice for us. Most days, I don’t bother wiping all the sand out of the crevices of that coffee mug. It’s a small reminder that the timeline that fits your life is the one that matters, not the one everyone else tells you to follow.
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