Should I put baby on hold for two more vacations?
I found my old high-waisted bikini crumpled in the back of my sock drawer last night while I was looking for a pair of running socks. It still has that faint brown sand stain on the butt from that weekend at the Outer Banks two years ago, the one where we camped and got caught in a thunderstorm and our tent flooded. I ran my thumb over the stain and immediately started thinking about that question I can’t stop turning over in my head lately: do we hit pause on trying to get pregnant until after we do these two stupid little vacations we’ve got planned?
On paper, we’re ready. We bought our crappy little starter home two years ago, fixed the leaky roof and painted the worst of the beige walls. We got our rescue dog Mabel, who’s now three and out of the stage where she chews anything smaller than her head. Both of us have stable jobs with decent parental leave, and our families all live within a two hour drive, which everyone says is a win. For the last year, every dinner with my aunt ends with her leaning across the table and asking when we’re gonna give her a great-niece or nephew, which is annoying but also, I get it. I want that too, most days.
Then this spring, my cousin called. She’d won a timeshare week in Cabo that she can’t use anymore because her new job makes her do mandatory training that week, and she couldn’t get the date changed. She offered it to us for just the $80 cleaning fee. How do you turn down a free week on the beach? We said yes immediately, before we even remembered we’d already booked a trip to Portugal for next April, put a $500 deposit on that tiny Airbnb in Alfama that overlooks the water, bought non-refundable plane tickets. So now we’ve got two trips back to back: Cabo this fall, Portugal next spring. If we start trying now, the odds are pretty good I’ll end up pregnant for at least one of them, maybe both.
I brought it up at my annual gynecologist appointment a couple weeks ago. When she asked when we were thinking of starting trying, I blurted out “well we have these two trips so probably after” and she just nodded and smiled that polite doctor smile, the one that means you’re overthinking something small but she’s not gonna say it out loud. I walked out to my car and sat there for five minutes after, feeling like an asshole. Like I’m prioritizing sun and overpriced wine over having a kid, like I’m wasting time that other people would give anything to have. That awkward feeling got worse when I brought it up to my friend Lila, who’s been trying for two years and just did her second round of IUI. I didn’t even realize what I was saying until the words were out of my mouth, and I immediately started backtracking, but she just stirred her oat latte and said it was fine. She said she actually wishes she’d taken one more big trip alone with her husband before they started, that she wouldn’t judge me for wanting that. It still left a bad taste in my mouth, though.
My sister, who has two little boys ages 4 and 6, says I should absolutely wait. She says people always tell you that you can still go on vacation after kids, and it’s true, but it’s not the same vacation. You don’t spend 12 hours wandering a foreign city stopping at every tiny tapas bar that looks cool, you don’t stay up until 2am drinking wine on a balcony just because you can, you don’t spend three days doing basically nothing but laying on the beach reading bad thriller novels. Last year she and her husband went to Florida without the kids, their first trip alone in five years, and she said she spent half the time refreshing the baby monitor app on her phone and worrying that the oldest was misbehaving for the babysitter. That specific kind of lazy, selfish, no-responsibilities time just the two of you? It doesn’t come back for a really long time, if ever.
But there’s this little niggling voice in my head that won’t shut up. What if it takes us a long time? What if we wait 10 months, get back from Portugal, start trying, and it takes two years? I’ll be 33 before I’m even pregnant, 34 when the baby comes. I know that’s not ancient, I know dozens of people who had healthy babies older than that, but my grandma had trouble conceiving, there’s that little family history thing that creeps in when I’m lying awake at 3am. What if I waited too long for two beach trips? What if that stupid selfish time ends up costing me the thing I actually want more?
Last night I brought all this up to my partner while he was paused mid-game of FIFA. He shrugged and said why does it have to be all or nothing? Just start trying, if you get pregnant we go anyway, it’s fine. If you don’t, we drink all the port and eat all the cheese and have a great time. That sounds simple when he says it, but I’m the one who’d be pregnant. I’m the one who’d be dealing with morning sickness on a 10 hour flight, or sore feet walking up all those hills in Lisbon, or skipping all the raw sheep cheese and oysters I’ve been daydreaming about for a year. I don’t want to spend the whole trip resenting the baby before it’s even born. That’s a terrible thing to think, I know, but it’s true.
I folded the bikini back up last night and put it on the top shelf of my closet instead of shoving it back in the sock drawer. I still pull up the photos of that Lisbon Airbnb most Sundays when I’m drinking coffee at the kitchen table. I still check my ovulation app most days, just to see. I don’t have an answer yet. No big revelation, no perfect plan. Some days I think I’m just being ridiculous for overthinking this whole thing. Some days I think I’m smart for holding onto this one tiny last bit of just us before everything changes. I guess we’ll just see how it goes.
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