Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
Ana set her coffee down and pushed the saucer away. We were four hours into a long lunch, the kind where you linger until the waitstaff start stacking chairs. She had just come back from two weeks in Portugal with her husband, and they’d booked another trip to Japan for late spring.
“So,” she said, crossing her arms. “We keep saying ‘after this trip, after the next one.’ But I’m 35. My doctor uses that word—geriatric—for anyone over 34, which is super comforting. Should I wait to get pregnant until we’ve had a couple more vacations?”
I knew that feeling. I recognized it from the pit of my own stomach, from the year I spent convinced the right time would announce itself with a certain amount of savings in the bank and a gap in our calendar wide enough to rest in.
I remember sitting in our living room one night, planning a small road trip up the coast, and my husband asking if we should “start trying” the month after. And I froze. Because I wanted babies—badly. But I also wanted to sit at a tiny café in a foreign city with nothing but our day ahead of us. And I wanted the version of us that could decide to do that on a random Tuesday.
Those two things felt like they couldn’t share a life.
I didn’t tell Ana all of that right away. Instead, I told her about the family I used to see at the school where I worked.
There was a little girl named Margot whose parents took her to Peru when she was nine months old. Not a resort getaway. They backpacked, roughly, with a carrier and a collapsible bassinet. Her mother once told me that the trip was a disaster in the best way. Margot cried through several long bus rides. They ate at odd hours. They ditched half their itinerary. And yet, the mother said, when the trip was over, she felt more like herself than she had in years. Because they hadn’t canceled their life, they’d just changed its shape.
I also thought about another family—the parents who’d waited until their daughter was six before taking a big international trip. They were more rested, sure. The kid remembered it. But they’d spent six years postponing a kind of freedom they could have had in smaller doses.
Here’s what I’ve learned, sitting with my own body after infertility scares and eventual motherhood, and watching dozens of parents walk through my classroom doors: the vacation is never the actual issue.
The issue is what the vacation stands for. Mostly, it stands for a version of yourself you’re afraid to lose. The spontaneous version. The unbroken-sleep version. The version that doesn’t have to negotiate with anyone about nap schedules or snack types or whether a small child will tolerate a loud restaurant. It’s rational to want to hang onto those things a little longer. It doesn’t make you selfish. It makes you aware.
But here’s the thing I didn’t understand before I had a child: those free versions of us don’t just vanish like a door slamming shut. They go into a drawer, and sometimes you take them out. They’re just no longer the default.
When Ana asked whether she should wait, what she was really asking was: will I ever get to be that person again if I have a baby now?
The honest answer isn’t “no,” and it isn’t “yes.” It’s “differently.”
After my son was born, we didn’t travel for ten months. We couldn’t afford it, physically or financially. I grieved the version of us that could just book a flight. But around his first birthday, we booked a three-day trip to a nearby town. Not far. Not exotic. We drove four hours to a hotel with a pool, and we spent most of the trip following him around the shallow end while he screamed with joy. We didn’t see a single museum. We ate one sit-down dinner, and one of us had to pace up and down the restaurant’s outdoor walkway with him in a carrier while the other ate quickly.
It wasn’t Portugal. But in a strange way, it was more memorable. Because it was ours—the new version.
A friend who had her first at 38 once said something to me that’s stuck. She said: “You don’t get pregnant after the vacations. You get pregnant at the start of the vacations. The vacations keep coming.”
She was right. People talk about having a baby “after we have fun.” But babies don’t neatly schedule themselves around a travel budget. And the pregnancy itself is a long, slow liminal space—it doesn’t wait for a clean break between vacations either.
If Ana wants to be practical, there are actual logistics to consider. Morning sickness, for one, can be fiercely un-touristy. The second trimester might feel great, or it might come with heartburn and a growing belly that makes a long-haul flight less dreamy. You might have the baby and then find that you have zero interest in a big trip for a while. That’s common and okay.
But I think the deeper question—the one that keeps coming up with the parents I work with—is about readiness. Not readiness personified by a blank calendar, but readiness to hold a tiny helpless person and know that you’ll never fully return to the life you had. That’s not a warning. It’s just a fact. And no number of holidays can soften that transition. It’s work, and it’s joy, and it’s work again.
So what would I actually tell Ana, after the coffee shop, in the car outside her house?
I’d say: don’t wait for a “last vacation.” There is no last vacation. There’s just the trip you take, and then the trips you take with a small person who will someday leave a sticky handprint on your passport and call it a masterpiece.
You don’t have to decide anything this month. You can keep enjoying Japan in the spring. You can let the question sit heavily in your chest and roll it around. That’s fine. In my experience, the people who make parenting look easy are not the ones who waited for the absolute perfect time. They’re the ones who got pregnant anyway—with the trips on the calendar still glowing in their peripheral vision—and then let themselves be surprised by how much room another kind of person can make.
There’s no right way to time it. There’s just your life, right now, with its messy contradictions: you want a baby and a nap and a plane ticket, possibly all in the same hour. I still feel that way some days.
Ana probably will too. And that’s okay.
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