Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The condensation from Lila’s mimosa is leaving a dark ring on the patio table, and she’s been pushing her avocado toast around the plate for 10 minutes without taking a bite. She just got back from two back-to-back trips: two weeks in Bali with her husband, then a long weekend hiking the Rockies with her sister, and her Instagram comments are full of the same question she’s been asking me today: Why wait to get pregnant when you just had all that fun? Why put it off for a couple of vacations?
Her mom brought it up at Sunday dinner last week, said “your clock’s ticking, you can travel when the kids are older.” A coworker told her she was wasting her prime fertility years for sunsets and souvenirs. Lila twists the woven sun-faded bracelet she bought at a Ubud market and says, “We worked overtime every other week for 18 months to save for these. We haven’t had more than four consecutive days off together since we bought our house three years ago. Is it really that crazy to want this time before we start changing all the diapers?”
I remember sitting in this same spot five years ago, in her exact position. I had two trips already booked: a 10-day trip to Portugal with my husband, then a girls’ beach trip I’d planned with my college roommates a year in advance. I’d just decided we’d hold off on trying to conceive until we got back, and every other person I told had an opinion. My aunt said I was being selfish. My cousin, who’d had her first kid at 26, told me I’d regret waiting if I struggled to get pregnant later.
The first thing I did, which I told Lila to do too, was make an appointment with my OB to talk through actual risks, not the internet horror stories. For me, 30 at the time with no known fertility issues, she told me a 10-month delay wasn’t going to make any meaningful difference in my chances of having a healthy baby. She said the only caveat was if we were doing high-risk adventure travel that could lead to injury impacting pregnancy, but we were just eating pastries and walking along coastal trails, so that wasn’t a concern. That’s the first concrete step anyone torn can take: check in with your own doctor based on your own health history, not the unsolicited advice from the cousin at Thanksgiving.
I went on both trips. We stayed up until 2am drinking vinho verde in a Lisbon alley, I fell asleep on the beach with my friends and forgot to check my phone for 12 hours, we came home with sunburn and a pocket full of sea glass and that little ceramic tile I still hang by my front door. We started trying the next month, got pregnant three months later, and had our son 9 months after that.
What no one told me before I had him was how much those early newborn days drain you. The first six months, I was up every two hours, I forgot what it felt like to take a shower alone, I cried over a broken coffee pot because I was just that tired. And not once in those hard days did I think, why did we waste that time traveling? I thought, I’m so glad we had that time just us, before we became mom and dad. Because once you’re a parent, that specific kind of low-key, unstructured travel doesn’t come back the same way. Don’t get me wrong, we travel now with our son, he’s four and we just got back from a trip to the Smoky Mountains, and it’s fun. But it’s not the same as wandering a foreign city for six hours because you feel like it, or sleeping in until 10 because no one needs a bottle at 7. It’s just different.
That’s not to say waiting is the right choice for everyone. My best friend got pregnant unexpectedly right after she got engaged, never took that big European trip she’d been planning, and she’s never cared. She travels with her two boys now, and she says she wouldn’t have it any other way. A friend of mine in her late 30s started trying right away after getting married, skipped the big trips, because she knew she wanted kids and was worried about fertility, and that was the right choice for her. There’s no one right answer.
If you’re torn, try this: sit down with your partner on a night when you’re not both exhausted from work, and write down three things that matter most to you before you bring a kid home. If two of the top three are those vacations you’ve been saving for, that’s your answer. If starting your family is at the top of the list and the trips can wait, that’s your answer too. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for your timeline. I stopped telling random people our trying timeline after a woman at the grocery store asked me when I was going to have kids and then lectured me for 10 minutes about waiting for travel. You don’t have to post your plans on Instagram, you don’t have to respond to the comments, it’s none of their business.
Back at brunch, Lila orders another side of bacon and says she’s still not 100% sure. I tell her that’s fine, there’s no test to pass here. A month later, I get a text from her: a photo of a camping reservation confirmation for the Olympic Peninsula, scheduled for next October. She says they’re going to take that trip, then start trying after they get home. I text back a thumbs up and a taco emoji, no big speech about how it’s the right choice. Some days, moms in my playgroup ask me the same question Lila asked, and I just tell them what I know: if the question is weighing on you enough to ask it, that thing you’re waiting for matters more than any person’s opinion. You’ll figure it out as you go, same as everything else in parenting.
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