Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking Vacations? A Mom’s Honest Perspective
The iced tea on my back porch was sweating through its coaster last June when Lila leaned forward, pushed her Instagram feed across the table, and said the thing half of my childbearing-aged friends have asked me at one point or another. “We did the two big vacations we’d planned for years. Now what? Do we actually wait longer, or do we start trying?” My 3-year-old was ten feet away, stuffing mulch into the pocket of her overalls with a broken plastic trowel, so I had a minute to think before I answered. I’d been in that exact spot five years earlier.
My husband and I had the same plan when we got married. We’d both grown up low-income, never left the country as kids, so we’d scrimped for three years, put every extra paycheck toward two trips: a two-week road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway, camping every other night, eating gas station burritos for lunch, and then a week in a beach bungalow in Costa Rica where we promised we wouldn’t check work emails once. The plan was simple: check those off, then start trying for a baby. But halfway through the Costa Rica trip, I couldn’t sleep one night. I was lying in a hammock listening to howler monkeys, scrolling through fertility forums on my phone, panicking. All the stories I read said waiting was a mistake – that fertility drops after 30, that you never get that time back again, that we were being selfish for putting off a baby just to go on vacation. Another set of stories said starting before you got your travels in was a mistake – that you’d never get another alone trip with your partner ever again, that you’d resent your kid for taking that away. I had no idea who to believe.
When I got home, I talked to my OB about it, not just for medical advice, but for perspective as an older mom who’d had kids both early in her marriage and later. She told me something that stuck with me, that I’ve passed along to every friend who’s asked since. First, ask yourself this concrete question: if you got a positive pregnancy test tomorrow, would you be heartbroken, or just surprised? That’s way more useful than any pros and cons list you’ll read online. If the answer is heartbroken, that means you’re genuinely not ready, and waiting to take your trips is the right call. If the answer is surprised but okay, that means the “wait for vacations” thing is just a box you’re checking, and it’s not worth delaying for another year or two just to hit that mark.
I ended up asking myself that question back then. If I’d gotten pregnant on that Costa Rica trip, would I have been sad? I thought about it for a long time, and the answer was no. I would have been shocked, I would have had to change our itinerary a little, but I wouldn’t have been heartbroken. But I still was glad we waited until we got home to start. What no one talks about is what those pre-baby vacations actually give you, if you’ve been burnt out from years of working to save for a wedding, a house, and a stable life together. I’d been pulling 60-hour work weeks for three years leading up to our wedding. I was short-tempered, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a full weekend off that didn’t involve cleaning or wedding planning. Those two months of traveling weren’t just fancy photos for Instagram. They were a chance to reset. I slept in until 9 every day. I didn’t have a million to-do lists hanging over my head. I reconnected with my husband, without all the noise of everyday life. When we got home and started trying, I felt like I could actually show up for pregnancy and for a baby, instead of bringing all that exhaustion with me into the newborn haze.
The second concrete question I tell people to ask is: what kind of vacations are you waiting for, anyway? If you’re saving for a three-month backpacking trip through Nepal, or a luxury European tour that you’ve dreamed of since you were a teenager, that’s the kind of trip that’s really hard to pull off with a toddler or a preschooler. It’s not impossible, but it’s totally different, and if that’s the experience you want, waiting to have that experience before you have a kid makes total sense. But if you’re talking about a couple of long weekend trips to the lake, or a beach trip next year, that stuff is totally doable with a kid. It’s messier, it’s more expensive, you don’t get to nap as much, but it’s still a vacation. We ended up going to Japan when my daughter was 2, a trip we almost delayed starting our family for. We didn’t get to spend all day bar-hopping in Tokyo or hike for 8 hours up a mountain like we would have before kids, but we got to watch her see snow for the first time in the Japanese Alps, and eat her first taiyaki covered in red bean, and that’s a memory I wouldn’t trade for the “perfect” pre-kid trip.
Lila ended up going on that small mountain trip she and her husband had already planned, then started trying that fall. She got pregnant two months later, had her little boy last November. I went to visit her last month, and she was sitting on her couch, nursing him while he napped against her chest, and she said she’s glad they waited for their two big trips. That time with just her and her husband is something she’ll always have, and she doesn’t feel like she missed out on anything by taking it first. But she also said if it had happened earlier, if she’d gotten pregnant before the trips, it would have been okay too.
There’s no right answer that fits everyone. Some people are ready to have a kid before they check every travel box off their list. Some people need that time to rest and reconnect first. The only mistake is forcing yourself into a choice that doesn’t feel right for you, just because someone online said waiting is selfish or starting early is reckless. Right now, Lila’s already planning their first family trip to the beach this summer. The baby will probably eat half the sand, and they won’t get to nap in the afternoon like they did on their pre-baby trip, but that’s okay. It’s just a different kind of vacation.
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