Should we wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations? What I told my friend
They were stacking the coffee cups at the café near the departure gates when Maya leaned across the table and asked the question. Her husband was at the kiosk buying a second pastel de nata, and she had just spent twenty minutes telling me about the hills of Lisbon, the custard tarts, the little balcony above the street where couples drank wine until midnight. She is thirty-four. They’ve been married almost three years. The list of countries on her fridge still has seven items on it.
“Do you think we should wait?” she asked. “Just take a couple more vacations. You know, one last big one before we start trying.”
I knew what “trying” meant for her because it meant the same thing for me at her age. There’s a particular weight to that word. It sits in the middle of the sentence and makes everything else sound like packing a lunch for a hike. The trip matters. The trying matters. And somehow both things start to feel like they belong in the same suitcase.
I didn’t answer right away. I watched a family roll by with a stroller, a toddler in a striped shirt chewing on a shoe. The mother was holding a passport, the father was balancing two coffees. They looked exhausted and alive.
“What would you even do on the trips?” I asked Maya. “If you knew you were going to get pregnant right after?”
She tilted her head. “Hike the Rila Lakes. Maybe stand in a hot spring. Drink wine in someone’s vineyard.” She paused. “Weird question.”
That’s the thing, I told her. You don’t realize how much of a “last normal trip” is built around things you’ll have to press pause on. My husband and I tried the experiment before we started trying. We took a weekend in Portland where I pretended I was already expecting. I called it the Dry Run. No hot springs. No sake tasting. We walked through the Japanese Garden slowly, sat on a bench for forty minutes, ate udon at a place with paper lanterns. It was boring for an afternoon. Then it wasn’t. By Sunday I’d stopped checking my watch.
When my daughter was ten months old, we went to the coast. Not a bucket-list destination, just a beach town. I carried her in a soft carrier and let her grab at eucalyptus leaves. She fell asleep against my chest, and I stood on a cliff path listening to the waves, and I realized something I’d been too stubborn to understand earlier: you don’t finish vacations. You just trade one kind for another.
I think that conversation is rarely about the trips, and I told Maya that. It’s about what the trips are supposed to purchase for you. Freedom, rest, proof that you’re still young, proof that you can still be spontaneous. None of those things disappear when you have a child. They just stop being free of charge. You pay for them with planning, with patience, with the faint smell of banana that lives in your car forever now.
The medical reality is simpler than the emotional one. I asked my OB about timing when I was her age. She said, “Your uterus doesn’t check your boarding pass.” She meant that if you have a medical issue waiting to appear, a trip won’t postpone it, and if you’re healthy, six months of travel won’t change your fertility in any measurable way. She said, “The vacations aren’t the variable. Age is. So if you’re going to wait, wait because you want to, not because you think Portugal is doing your reproductive system favors.”
We laughed. But I’ve told that to three friends since, and every one of them relaxed a little. They wanted permission to take the trip without pretending it was a medically necessary pre-pregnancy protocol.
Here’s what I’d actually want a friend to think through, concretely.
Take the real cost of the trip. Not the flight, not the hotel — the cost of what you’ll be physically able to do. If you go to Vietnam and intend to eat street food every day and cycle the Hai Van Pass, and you get pregnant a week before you leave, you’ll be carrying a small human in your pelvis while someone hands you a bowl of eggs that wobble. Is that fine? It is for some women. It wasn’t for me on certain days. So plan the trip like a pregnant person. Not as a punishment. Just to see if the trip is still worth the money when the workouts become gentle walks and the late-night wine becomes a quiet hotel room and the emergency exit you check is not the fire door but the nearest bathroom.
See if the trip still sounds good. That tells you something about whether you’re ready for the bigger interruption.
The money question matters too, but not in the way people think. A week in Lisbon is a few thousand dollars. A weekend with a toddler is also a few thousand dollars, once you count the car seat, the stroller, the extra snacks, the hotel suite because you need a separate room for bed-sharing, the flights where you buy a whole seat you didn’t really need because a lap baby is a free torture device on a five-hour flight. Travel doesn’t get cheaper with a baby. It gets parallel to what it used to cost, just shaped differently. So if you’re waiting to “save up for the baby first,” you can be waiting forever.
I didn’t tell Maya all of this in one go. We sat there while her husband came back and split the last tart with a plastic fork. She asked me directly then, with the coffee cups piled and the flight board flickering, “But did you ever regret waiting?”
And I thought about it. We waited. Not for trips — for me it was money, and fear, and the unsettled feeling that I wasn’t done being only a wife yet. Then I did that fake pregnancy weekend in Portland. Then we went to Japan. It rained half the time. I caught a cold. We spent a full day in a capsule hotel because my sinuses couldn’t handle the air. And I remember standing in a 7-Eleven at midnight, eating a steamed bun and feeling unaccountably happy. We got home, and I put a note on the calendar. That fall we started trying.
It took eleven months. Almost a year. In that year I went through a stack of pregnancy tests and a small cemetery of negative ones. And the only memory that still holds any weight from that time is not the trips — it’s the kitchen counter, the waiting, the way the mornings started to feel like announcements.
So no, I don’t regret waiting. I’d never regret it. But I’d never recommend waiting because of the vacations. What we were waiting for, underneath it, was a kind of readiness that never fully arrived. It arrived anyway, in pieces.
Maya and her husband booked the tickets to Bali. She texted me from an airport lounge a month later, two line breaks and a photo of a pharmacy receipt. I wrote back, “Congrats. You’ll be nauseous by the time you hit the monkey forest. Hire the guide.”
They went. She slept by the pool for three days. They ate at a warung, walked the rice terraces at six in the morning, watched a gecko crawl across the ceiling. She told me she threw up in a taxi between Ubud and the coast. She said she didn’t feel like she’d lost anything. She said the trip was the last of its kind, probably.
I still think about that line. She was wrong, by the way. They took the baby to the Azores last spring, and the trips aren’t over. They’re just different, with the weight of a small person in the room, and the faint smell of banana in the car, and the departure board still flickering overhead, promising somewhere else.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should we wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations