Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Experience
Sand crumbles off my sunscreened calves onto the wooden patio table, and my phone pings through the noise of crashing waves and screaming kids from the hotel pool down the beach. It’s a text from my little sister, who’s 29 and just booked her second big trip this year—one to the Amalfi Coast in fall, followed by a long ski trip over Christmas. The text reads: “Everyone keeps asking when we’re gonna start trying for a kid. Should I wait to get pregnant after these vacations, or pull the plug now and start trying?”
I lean back in my plastic beach chair, stir my melting margarita, and I remember being where she is. Five years ago, my husband and I had just closed on our first house, all our college friends were posting birth announcements every other week, and we had a two-week trip to Japan booked six months out, plus a long weekend in Hawaii three months after that. My mom pulled me aside at a family barbecue and said, “You’re 31, you don’t want to wait too long, right?” My best friend, who’d gotten pregnant two weeks after her wedding and spent most of her Bali honeymoon vomiting in a hotel room, grabbed my arm later and said, “Go. Go have fun, you’ll never get this time back again.” I left that barbecue confused, and a week later I left my OB’s office crying in my car, because he’d mentioned my egg reserve was a little lower than average for my age. I thought I was being selfish for wanting to eat sushi at 1am in Tokyo before I had a baby.
I made a stupid little list in the notes app of my phone, not the fancy kind people post on Pinterest, just bullet points of actual things that mattered to me. If we waited a year to start trying, what could go wrong? I wrote: We might struggle to get pregnant, might need fertility treatments, might end up waiting longer than we want. If we started trying now, what could go wrong? I wrote: I’d be stressed about testing for pregnancy while traveling, if I got pregnant I could be sick first trimester and miss the entire trip, I’d always wonder what it would’ve been like to go on that trip as just us two.
We went. I didn’t spend the whole trip panicking about when my period was due, I didn’t cut my hike up Fushimi Inari short because of morning sickness, I ate raw oysters and drank sake and stayed up talking to a couple of backpackers from Australia until 2am. In Hawaii, I surfed for three hours straight, got so sunburned on my back I couldn’t sleep on my back for three days, and drank a cold beer while watching sunset without setting an alarm for 6am the next day. When we got home, we started trying, and I got pregnant the second month.
That doesn’t mean it works out that way for everyone, of course. My friend Kara waited two years for two big African safaris she’d been saving for since she was 19, and she ended up needing four rounds of IVF to get pregnant. She has a two-year-old now, and when I asked her if she regretted it, she shook her head and said she’d have regretted skipping the safaris more. She said even if it took longer, she knew she’d have spent every pregnancy appointment wondering if she’d messed up by not going. Another friend, Sarah, got pregnant accidentally right before her big European trip, and she just adjusted the itinerary—she stayed in nicer hotels, cut out the 12-mile walking days, and still had a great time. It just depends on what you want.
There’s a few concrete things I tell people who ask me this question, that I told my sister. First, go get a 20-minute basic fertility check with your OB before you decide. It’s not scary, it’s just a blood test and an ultrasound, and it’ll tell you if waiting a year is a big risk or not. If you’re over 35 or have known issues like PCOS, that changes things, but if you’re healthy and your numbers are good, waiting a little isn’t the big mistake everyone makes it out to be. Second, ask yourself if these are the kind of trips you can’t re-create with a kid. A long weekend to see your grandma an hour away? You can take a baby there, no problem. A two-week backpacking trip through Patagonia or a food tour of Southeast Asia that you’ve been saving for a decade? That’s not the same trip with a toddler, and it’ll be at least five or six years before you can do that trip the way you want to. Third, write down the actual worst-case scenarios for both choices, not the scary vague ones people tell you. “Waiting will make you infertile” is not an actual worst case for most people, but “you’ll miss the trip you’ve been planning for half your life” is a real thing you’ll have to live with.
I texted all that back to my sister, sitting there on the beach. She wrote back an hour later saying she’s sticking with the trips, and they’ll start trying in January. Some weeks she texts me panicking that she waited too long, some weeks she sends me screenshots of her Amalfi itinerary and says she’s so glad she’s going. No one can tell her what the right answer is, and there’s no perfect outcome that fits everyone.
Today, I’m home from that beach trip, and my four-year-old is covered in chalk drawing rainbows on the patio. I don’t regret my choice to wait. I don’t think I’d have been as present for her first years if I’d spent those early years wondering what it would’ve been like to see Japan with my husband. I also know that if I’d gotten pregnant before those trips, I would have adjusted and been happy too. The question doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, and that’s okay. All you can do is figure out what matters most to you, and go from there.
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