Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Wish I’d Known
The ice in my latte was half-melted by the time Lila leaned across the table, lowered her voice, and asked the question she’d been turning over for three weeks. “Should I wait to get pregnant after our couple of vacations?” Her engagement ring caught the May sunlight through the coffee shop window, and she tapped the crumpled printout of her travel itinerary next to her water glass. We’d just looked at photos from her recent Pacific Coast road trip: sunburned shoulders, a taco stacked taller than her hand, her boyfriend grinning with a sea lion in the background. Now they had a destination wedding in Jamaica coming up in October, and a long-planned skiing weekend in Utah booked for January. Non-refundable deposits, group tickets, friends flying in from all over the country.
I nodded, because I’d been that girl, five years earlier. My husband and I had been ready to start trying, but we had a 10-day trip to Italy booked six months out, and a two-week camping trip through the Rockies planned for the following summer. Every person we told we were thinking of starting trying immediately said the same thing: Wait. Go have your fun now. You’ll never get to travel like that again once you have kids. So we waited.
We went to Italy, ate so much pasta I had to buy a new pair of pants on our third day, drank local wine until we fell asleep on the side of a canal in Venice. We went camping in the Rockies, hiked until our calves ached, and watched the stars come out over the Continental Divide with no alarm set for the next morning. It was magical. It was everything everyone said it would be. Then we came home, stopped using birth control, and started trying. Eighteen months and one early miscarriage later, I was sitting on my bathroom floor crying, wondering why we’d put this off for two vacations that were already just memories.
It didn’t have to be that way, and it’s not that way for everyone. My friend Sarah waited two years, took four international vacations, got pregnant on her third month of trying, and now has two healthy kids. She still talks about that trip to Vietnam as the best pre-kid adventure she ever could have had. So there’s no one right answer, but there are questions I wish someone had asked me before I decided to wait, that I asked Lila to think through that afternoon.
First, I asked her how old she was, and what she knew about her own fertility. Lila’s 30, no known fertility issues, so waiting six to nine months for her trips doesn’t come with the same risk it would for someone who’s 38, or who has PCOS, or who’s already had trouble conceiving. That’s not a judgment on anyone’s choice, it’s just a fact: fertility changes with age, and an extra year of waiting can change outcomes for some people, while it doesn’t for others. If you’re in your 20s and healthy, waiting for a couple of trips you’ve been planning for years is a totally reasonable call. If you’re already worried about how long it might take, those trips might not be worth the what-if later.
Second, I asked her what she’d actually lose if she started trying now, and how hard it would be to change plans. A lot of people don’t check their booking fine print before they decide to wait. After my miscarriage, I found out that most airlines and resorts will let you change your dates for a $50 to $100 fee, even if they say they’re non-refundable. Travel insurance often covers trip cancellations for pregnancy, too, if you have it. Lila pulled out her phone while we were sitting there, called the Utah ski resort, and found out she could move her long weekend to the following year for a $75 change fee. That eliminated half her stress right there. She didn’t have to choose between the trip and starting her family, she just had to move the trip.
Third, I told her to stop buying the myth that those pre-kid vacations are the only good vacations you’ll ever get. Everyone says it, but it’s just not true. My son is four now, and we’ve taken six trips with him since he was born. Last summer we camped in the Great Smoky Mountains, and he spent three hours chasing a tiny green frog around a creek, and that’s one of my favorite vacation memories I’ve ever had. We went to the beach last fall, and he built a sandcastle so big he could sit inside it. It’s different than traveling without kids. You don’t get three hours of afternoon naps in a hotel room, or a long dinner at a fancy restaurant without cutting it short because someone has to pee. But it’s still fun. It’s still vacation. You don’t stop having nice trips just because you have kids.
Last week Lila texted me a photo of a positive pregnancy test, taken with a half-eaten plate of jerk chicken next to it, from a beach in Jamaica. She’s 12 weeks along, she skipped the snorkeling trip with the wedding group, and just lay on the beach reading the whole week. She’s still going to move the skiing trip to next year, and she says she doesn’t regret starting when she did.
I still think about my Italy trip sometimes, and how special it was to have that time with just my husband. I also still think about that 18 months of waiting, and how heavy that stress was. There’s no perfect answer here. Some people will wait and it will work out great, some people will wish they’d started sooner. The only thing I know for sure is that no one else’s “you should” matters more than your own what-if. Right now, that’s enough.
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