I’m Still On The Fence About Waiting For Vacations Before Trying For A Baby
I found a half-used tube of reef-safe sunscreen crumpled at the bottom of my hiking backpack this morning, while I was digging out a rain jacket I need for work this week. It’s from our trip to Cancun last spring, the cap’s all sticky with sand that never brushed off, and it expired back in September. I’ve been meaning to throw it out for three months, but I just set it on the kitchen counter instead, and now I’m staring at it while my coffee goes cold, thinking about the text my best friend sent me last night. She saw we posted that we booked our Amalfi Coast and Tokyo trips for next year, and she wrote back, “Good call! Get all your traveling out now before you pop, right?” Which is the same thing everyone says when I tell people we’re thinking of waiting to try for a baby until after these two trips.
On paper, it makes all the sense in the world. I’ve seen my sister go through first trimester, when she couldn’t even stand the smell of coffee, let alone hike 5 miles a day along coastal cliffs or eat my way through a Tokyo street food market. We put down a $1200 non-refundable deposit on that little cliffside Airbnb in Positano, saved for these trips for two years, picked out all the little family-run restaurants we wanna try, the ferry trips to Capri, the matcha tasting in Kyoto we’ve had bookmarked since 2021. If I get pregnant right now, there’s a solid chance I’ll be eight and a half months swollen and exhausted on the Tokyo trip, not even able to eat raw fish or half the street food we’re planning to try. Or I’ll be throwing up every morning in Amalfi, and my partner will end up eating all the lemon gelato alone while I lay in the dark of the Airbnb. Why spend all that money just to be miserable, right? That’s what everyone says, and I get it.
But the thing no one says out loud much, that just nags at me when I’m lying awake at 2 a.m., is what if waiting doesn’t go the way we plan? My cousin got pregnant right after she finished her two pre-baby trips, and she ended up miscarrying at 14 weeks, and by the time she was healthy enough to try again, it took three more years. She’s 36 now, still trying, and she never even got to go on the second trip she booked, because she was too stressed with fertility appointments to go. I’m 32, not some ancient person who’s running out of time, but I’ve heard enough stories from enough people to know that it doesn’t always just happen when you want it to. I don’t wanna look back in five years and wonder why I waited for two stupid vacations when I could have started trying sooner.
Last month we went to my partner’s annual work holiday party, and his CEO’s wife cornered me by the cheese platter asking when we were gonna have kids. I did that thing I always do, said “oh we’re just waiting to get a couple of our dream vacations out first”, and she just snort-laughed into her glass of wine, got a little parmesan flake on my sleeve, and said “Honey, I waited for the perfect ‘no trips left’ time too. Turns out the perfect time never shows up. We went to Aruba with our one year old, she ate half a cup of sand off the beach every day, pooped through three swim diapers in a week, and it was still the best vacation we ever had. You think you can’t have fun with a baby? Or pregnant? You’re just buying what everyone sells you, that pre-baby travel has to be perfect.” I brushed off the parmesan and smiled, but her words have been stuck in my head ever since.
My partner is useless in all this, by the way. He just says “whatever you want, I’m down either way.” Which I know is him trying to be nice, but it’s so infuriating. It’s not his body that’s gonna be growing a baby, it’s not him that’s gonna have morning sickness on a hike, it’s not him that has to deal with all the what-ifs if waiting goes wrong. So it all lands on me to decide. Last week I googled “can you travel to Japan while 7 months pregnant” just to see, and turns out most airlines let you fly up to 36 weeks, you just need a note from your doctor. A lot of the personal travel posts said it’s totally fine, you just take more breaks and stop for snacks more often. So it’s not even like it’s impossible if we start trying now. It’s just that I’ve got it in my head that it has to be perfect, that these trips have to be our last big hurrah before baby, that they have to be everything we dreamed of.
I saw a pregnant woman at the lake near our house last weekend, she was about 6 months, sitting on a blanket eating a rainbow snowcone, her golden retriever was running around chasing geese. She wasn’t stressed about not being able to hike the big trail or swim laps, she was just laughing when the dog ran through the blanket and knocked her half-eaten snowcone onto the grass. I thought, how many of the things I’m worried about are just made up in my head? I’ve never been pregnant, so I don’t actually know what it’s gonna be like. Maybe I’ll have an easy pregnancy, no morning sickness, I’ll still be able to hike and eat most things, and it’ll be fine. Or maybe I’ll have a terrible time, but we’ll still have good memories, even if I spend half the trip napping.
The cat just knocked the expired sunscreen off the counter, and it rolled under the fridge, so I gotta fish it out later. I still don’t know what I’m gonna do. Part of me wants to wait, get these trips done, have the perfect last hurrah everyone talks about. Part of me wants to stop putting off tomorrow just because I’m waiting for some perfect version of today. I don’t have a big answer, I don’t have some neat conclusion to wrap this all up. Today I’m just gonna leave it under the fridge, pour a new cup of coffee, and not decide. I guess I’ll figure it out eventually, one way or another.
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