Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
I was wiping a smudge of hot fudge off my jeans at our neighborhood coffee shop last month when Lila, my friend from the local mom’s group, leaned across the table and dropped the question. She’d just gotten back from a week in northern Portugal, her second big trip in three months, and her phone was full of photos of tiled courtyards and cold vinho verde she’d been scrolling through while we waited for our orders. “We planned this,” she said, stirring her cinnamon-dusted oat latte while a toddler screamed down the street at the playground. “We said we’d take two trips before we started trying, and now we did. But everyone keeps asking when we’re going to ‘get serious’ about having kids, and I can’t stop wondering if we messed up. Should we have waited to travel until after?”
My 3-year-old, Mia, was napping in the backseat of my car with a half-eaten bag of Goldfish, so I had time to tell her I’d been right where she was five years ago. My husband and I had been talking about starting a family for a year when we decided to book two back-to-back big trips first: a 10-day road trip around Iceland, then two weeks in Kyoto. All our friends were either having kids already or buying houses, and we got a lot of the same comments Lila’s gotten: You’re wasting your best fertile years. Once you have kids you’ll still be able to travel, it’s just different. Why put it off?
By the time we got home, I was sunburnt, 5 pounds heavier from all the fish and chips and matcha ice cream, and crippled with guilt. I’d check my ovulation app at night and wonder if we’d made a selfish choice. If I ended up struggling with fertility down the line, I’d only have myself to blame for skipping a year of trying to see hot springs and temples.
It didn’t turn out that way for me—I got pregnant three months after we got home, and Mia arrived 9 months later, healthy and loud. But that doesn’t mean waiting is the right call for everyone, and that’s what I told Lila. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but there are concrete things you can check to make the choice that fits you, not what your aunt or your Instagram feed says you should do.
First, check your finances. Lila’s biggest unspoken worry wasn’t fertility—it was that they’d blown most of their extra savings on plane tickets and hotels, and now they didn’t have a buffer for baby costs. That’s a real concern. Sit down and write down three non-negotiable numbers: the average out-of-pocket cost of a delivery in your area (you can find this on your insurance website in 5 minutes), three months of basic living expenses if one of you doesn’t get full paid leave, and the cost of the only baby things you actually need before birth (a safe car seat, a place for the baby to sleep, and a few packs of diapers). You don’t need a fancy nursery or a $1000 stroller to start. If you’ve got those three things covered even after paying for your trips, you don’t need to push back your timeline to save more. If you don’t, wait six months to build that buffer, then start trying. That’s it, no overcomplicating it.
Second, be honest about your fertility risk. I don’t say this to scare anyone, but it’s a real thing no one talks about when you’re talking about waiting for vacations. If you’re under 35, you have no known irregular periods, no family history of early menopause or fertility issues, waiting 6 to 12 months for a couple of trips doesn’t move the needle much on your overall odds. But if you’re over 35, or you know you have risk factors, don’t wait a full year for two big international trips. Swap one big trip for a long weekend at the beach an hour away, or plan to do the big trip after the baby is old enough to travel cheaply as an infant. That’s a simple adjustment that doesn’t mean you have to give up time away before starting your family.
The biggest thing I didn’t expect, though, is how that time before kids changed how I felt about early parenthood. The first six months with Mia were brutal. I didn’t sleep more than 3 hours at a stretch for four months, I cried over spilled milk more times than I can count, and there were days I couldn’t remember what it felt like to leave the house without a bag full of wipes and extra clothes. But I never once looked at Mia and thought I gave up those big trips for you. I already had them. I had the 12-hour days wandering Kyoto stopping at every tiny ramen shop I wanted, I had the night we camped next to a glacier in Iceland and drank cheap beer and didn’t set an alarm for the next morning. That stuff is in my memory, and it kept me from feeling bitter during the hardest days.
My phone buzzed halfway through our conversation, my husband texting that he’d forgotten to pick up milk on the way home from work, like he does every other Tuesday. I wiped another smudge of fudge off my jeans and told Lila that the guilt comes from everywhere, but at the end of the day, it’s your choice.
Lila texted me last week. She and her husband crunched the numbers, they’ve got the buffer they need, and they’re starting to try next month. They’re skipping the third big trip they had planned for fall and are just going to do a few weekend camping trips at the state park an hour away instead, to build up a little extra savings. That works for them.
Last night, I flipped through our old photo album from Iceland while Mia ate dinner and watched Bluey on the couch. There’s a photo of me covered in wind, grinning in front of a waterfall, that I look at sometimes. I still wonder sometimes what it would have been like to have kids a little younger, to have more energy for running around the playground now that I’m in my mid-30s. But I don’t regret the choice we made. It’s not the right answer for everyone, but it was the right one for me. And that’s enough.
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