The map of Portugal was spread across the kitchen table, held down at one corner by a half-empty mug of coffee. Maya was tracing a route along the coast with her finger, stopping at little towns she’d read about. We had two vacations planned for the summer—one to Portugal in June, and then a week at a friend’s cabin in Maine in August. It was going to be a good summer. She looked up at me. “So. Do we start trying before or after both trips?”
I didn’t have an answer, but I knew exactly what she was thinking. We had been saying “maybe soon” for months. Now “soon” had a calendar attached, and the calendar had plane tickets on it.
We spent the next few mornings going back and forth. If we got pregnant in April, she’d be in her second trimester by June—the travel window, supposedly the easiest. But she reminded me that “supposedly” is the operative word. What if she was tired? What if she didn’t want to hike the old town hills? What if the smell of fish in the seaside restaurants made her miserable? Then there was the August trip to the cabin, which was less about sightseeing and more about eating chips on a dock. That felt safer. But it would mean delaying until after the first trip anyway.
We were trying to plan a pregnancy the way we planned a rental car—economy class, no surprises. That’s not how it works. But the conversation was worth having, not because we found an answer, but because we had to admit that we were looking for a perfect time. And there isn’t one. There’s only a set of imperfect options that you have to choose between.
So we made lists, not on paper, but in the way you do when you’re lying in bed with the lights off. What mattered most?
For me, the trips mattered. But that felt shallow to say. Here we were, trying to build a family, and I was worried about losing a spot on a walking tour in Lisbon. Maya reminded me that it wasn’t shallow. Vacations are real. That week of sitting on a beach in Portugal or canoeing around a lake in Maine might be the last big trip we take as just the two of us. That’s worth protecting. She also said, without drama, that if she was pregnant and miserable on a trip, she would not remember it fondly. She would remember being hot and tired and nauseous. And that would be a shame.
We talked about what we could do to make it easier if we did get pregnant before the trips. We could plan more rest time. We could skip the long hikes and choose easier dinners. We could tell ourselves that a vacation with a pregnant partner is not the same as a vacation without one, and that’s okay. But we both knew that’s the kind of thing you say before, and then feel differently about when you’re actually there.
There was another factor, too. Maya is 34, and she’d read enough articles to know that age is not a buzzword—it matters, though not in the dramatic way the internet makes it sound. Her doctor had told her that there was no medical reason to rush, but also that it’s not something to postpone indefinitely without a reason. The trips were a reason. But a good one?
A friend of ours—someone who had waited through two job changes and one pandemic—said something useful once. She said that if you wait for the perfect moment, you’ll wait until you can’t run around with the kid you eventually have. She wasn’t saying to ignore practicalities. She was saying that every delay has a cost, and you have to be honest about what it is. Waiting six months to see Portugal is a clear cost. The benefit is that you get to see Portugal without worrying about anything. But there’s also a cost to waiting that is less visible: the extra months between now and when your family grows. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s there.
We started to move toward a compromise. What if we didn’t put pressure on it either way? The first trip was in June. If we started trying after the first trip, then August’s cabin week was still a buffer. She could be newly pregnant or not at all—it wouldn’t be far along. And if it happened earlier than we planned, we’d just deal with it. We’d be the couple on the plane with the ginger candies. That felt manageable.
But something else came up. We were at a party, talking to a couple with a one-year-old. We told them our dilemma, and they laughed. Not at us, exactly, but at the neatness of our plan. The mom said, “We got pregnant exactly in the month we said we wouldn’t. We spent the entire first trimester moving apartments. I napped on a yoga mat on the floor of an empty bedroom. You just do it.” It wasn’t a horror story. It was just a story. And it reminded us that our careful sequencing didn’t guarantee anything anyway. The biology doesn’t care about your itinerary.
So we tried a different approach. We stopped asking “When should we start?” and started asking “What are we actually nervous about?” I was nervous about missing out on trips. Maya was nervous about feeling unwell. I was also nervous about the big life change itself, which is easier to hide behind a plane ticket. Once we said that out loud, the trips became less important. They were still important. But they were no longer standing in for everything else.
In the end, we decided to start trying after the June trip. Not because it was the best answer, but because it was the answer we could live with. It gave us the Atlantic coast in June. It gave us a cabin in Maine with no morning sickness spoiling the lake swim. It also gave us, if I’m honest, a little more time to be just the two of us. That’s not a small thing.
We haven’t told anyone yet. The map is back in the drawer. We still don’t know what will happen. It might take longer than we expect, or it might happen right away, or it might happen in a way that makes our careful plan look silly. All those outcomes are possible. The only thing we’ve stopped doing is pretending that one of them is guaranteed. We’re just getting through the spring, buying sunscreen, and trying to remember that every decision about timing is less about getting it right and more about being honest about what you’re willing to let go of.
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