Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Real Parent’s Perspective
I’m sitting across from my friend Lila at a sun-faded brunch spot downtown, and she’s twisting the paper straw of her mango mimosa so hard the end is frayed. We’re six blocks from the children’s museum, and the table next to us has a toddler dropping cheerios into the crack between the booth cushions while his mom begs him to stop. Lila just got back from her second big trip in six months—Inca Trail hiking last spring, Amalfi Coast road trip this fall—and the question she’s been turning over for months finally comes out: should I have started trying for a baby already? Am I wasting time waiting after these vacations?
Five years ago, I was sitting in that exact same booth, asking myself the same question. My husband and I had saved for two years to do a two-week trip to Japan and a 10-day cross-country camping trip out west, and every person in our family had an opinion. My aunt left a stack of gently used newborn onesies on my porch with a note that said “waiting for the big news!” My coworker, who’d had her first at 36 after two years of fertility treatments, pulled me aside and told me I was being irresponsible to put it off. I was 31, my fertility numbers were all normal, but I couldn’t shake the guilt: what if something goes wrong, and these trips are the reason I don’t get to have a kid?
We went anyway. We packed our beat-up hiking boots, left our cats with my sister, and didn’t check a single ovulation app the whole two months we were traveling. I ate raw fish in Tokyo, got lost in the redwoods camping, drank too much cheap wine in California, and slept in until 9am every single day for two months. When we got home, we started trying, and I got pregnant the first cycle. That doesn’t happen for everyone, I know that, but what no one talks about is what that time gave me that I didn’t even know I needed.
I talk to so many new parents who skipped their pre-baby trips because they were in a hurry to start trying. Almost all of them tell me they have that little nagging what-if in the back of their head, even when they’re crazy in love with their kid. What if we’d done that trip? What if we’d had one more big adventure just us, before nap schedules and daycare bills and bedtime battles took over most of our bandwidth. Waiting for my trips didn’t take anything away from my daughter, but it gave me a whole collection of memories that are just mine and my husband’s. When I’m up at 3am with a teething toddler, or we’re fighting over who has to fold the endless pile of tiny socks, I can pull up that photo of us covered in mosquito bites sitting by a campfire in Yosemite, and remember that we were us before we were mom and dad. That’s a gift a lot of new parents don’t get, and it’s worth a lot more than any extra few months of trying that you might get by skipping the trip.
The elephant in the room is fertility, of course. Lila brought that up immediately: what if I wait, and I can’t get pregnant, and I’ll regret it forever? That’s a valid fear, and that’s where the concrete stuff comes in, not just vague “follow your heart” nonsense. If you’re under 35 and your doctor says your fertility is normal, waiting 12 to 18 months for a couple of trips doesn’t change your overall odds that much. If you’re over 35, or you already know you have fertility issues, book a 15-minute appointment with your OB before you lock in your trip plans. Ask for a basic fertility check, talk through your timeline, and see what they say. My cousin was 34 when she planned two big trips, she did the check, her doctor said waiting 18 months was fine, she ended up needing IVF, and she still says she doesn’t regret those trips. She said if she’d skipped them and spent 18 months going through IVF stressed and miserable, she would have had nothing but bad memories from that time, instead of a stack of good ones to get her through the hard parts.
If your trips are already paid for and planned, just go. There’s no point spending the whole trip stressing about “wasting time” that you end up ruining the vacation and go back more stressed than you left. If you don’t want to risk getting pregnant while you’re traveling, just use whatever birth control you prefer, no shame in that. It’s not an all or nothing choice. I know one woman who got pregnant accidentally on her second pre-baby vacation, she just cut the trip a little short, came home, and now that kid has a whole photo album of their first trip in utero. It worked out fine.
It doesn’t mean waiting is the right choice for everyone. I have a friend who couldn’t wait to start trying, she skipped her big European trip, had her kid two years later, and they’re going next year as a family of three. She doesn’t regret it at all. That’s the thing, there’s no one right answer. The problem is, so many people feel pressured to start trying right now, before they’re ready, before they check the big things off their list that they’ve wanted for years.
Lila ended up sticking to her plan, starting trying three months after her last trip. She’s seven months pregnant now, and she hung a framed photo of her and her husband on the Amalfi coast above the crib in the nursery. She still texts me sometimes, saying she worries she left it too late, that she’s tired and her back hurts and what if something goes wrong. But every time, she ends the text with “but I’d do it again anyway.”
I look at my four year old, who’s currently digging up my hostas in the backyard covered in mud, and I think the same thing. There’s no guarantee things will work out how you want them, no matter when you have kids. If the only thing making you question waiting is other people’s opinions or a vague fear you’re doing something wrong, that’s not a good enough reason to skip the trips you’ve dreamed of for years. I don’t have a neat answer for everyone, but that’s the best I’ve got after living it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations