Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Mom’s Honest Perspective
It’s 8:17 on a Tuesday night, I’m picking cold lo mein out of a takeout container, and my phone buzzes on the coffee table next to my 4-year-old’s lopsided crayon drawing of a dinosaur. It’s my friend Lila: “Me and Jake have two big trips booked this year – our Portugal anniversary trip and that cabin week with my college friends I’ve been planning for two years. Everyone’s on my back about waiting to get pregnant. Like, my mom says I’m ‘wasting my good fertility years’ and my coworker said I’ll regret it if it takes forever. Should I wait to get pregnant after these trips?”
I set my chopsticks down and think back to five years ago, when I was sitting in almost this exact same spot, just the dinosaur drawing wasn’t there, and my husband and I were staring at two confirmation emails in our inbox: one for a 10-day backpacking trip in Costa Rica we’d been planning since our engagement, and one for a long weekend to Florida to visit my husband’s grandma, who’d just been diagnosed with early dementia and couldn’t guarantee she’d remember us a year later. We’d been talking about starting to try for a baby for three months, and suddenly everyone had an opinion. My aunt pulled me aside at a summer BBQ, potato salad on her shirt, and said “I was 29 when I started trying, just like you, and it took me five years. Don’t roll the dice like that.” My OB said as long as I was healthy, there was no medical reason I couldn’t wait a year. But even my husband’s cousin posted something on Facebook about how you can always take vacations when your kids are grown, but you can’t get back your fertility.
We decided to wait. We packed our hiking boots and our sunscreen and left the dog with my mom, and spent 10 days hiking cloud forests and eating ripe mango from street carts and staying up late talking on a beach with no lights for miles. We didn’t set an alarm once the whole trip. We didn’t have to schedule anything around naps or medications or anyone else’s needs but our own. A month later, we drove down to Florida and sat on Grandma’s porch for three days, drinking sweet tea and looking through her old wedding photos, and she remembered my husband’s name the whole visit. That was the last time she did that.
We came home, stopped using birth control, and got pregnant three months later. That was that, for us. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right answer for everyone, which is what I told Lila. I didn’t give her some sappy line about how you’ll never travel again once you have a kid – that’s not true. We’ve taken our son to the beach and to visit my parents out of state and even had a nice long weekend in a cabin last fall. It’s just different. You don’t get to be just you and your partner anymore. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different thing.
What I did walk her through are three concrete questions to ask herself, that I wish someone had walked me through instead of just yelling opinions at me. First, what kind of trips are these? If they’re remote trips that require a lot of physical activity, or trips to places with limited access to prenatal care if something went wrong, or just trips you’ve dreamed of doing that you can’t really do pregnant or with a small kid, that’s a different thing than a weekend trip to a nearby lake that you can take any year. For me, that 10-day backpacking trip wasn’t something I could do 6 months pregnant, and it’s not something I can do with a 4-year-old who still needs to be carried up hills after an hour. I would’ve had to put that off for at least 10 years, maybe more, if I hadn’t done it then. Second, what’s your actual timeline look like? If you’re 38 and you’ve already had one miscarriage and your doctor says your egg count is low, waiting a year for two vacations is a way bigger call than if you’re 27, no known fertility issues, and you’re just not ready to stop traveling for a bit. Third, if things don’t go the way you plan, what regret will bother you more? Will it bother you more that you waited and it ended up taking longer to get pregnant than you thought, or will it bother you more that you skipped these trips you’ve been planning for years, and maybe never get another chance to do them the way you want to?
One concrete step I told her to do, if she decides to wait, is go get a preconception checkup before you leave. Ask your doctor to do whatever basic fertility tests you’re comfortable with, so you have a clear idea of where you stand going in. If you’re really worried about waiting, you can even talk to your doctor about options like freezing eggs if that’s something you can afford, just to take some of the pressure off.
Lila went on her trips last month. She texted me photos of her standing in a vineyard in the Algarve, holding a glass of vinho verde, sun on her face. Last week she came over for coffee, and pulled out her phone to show me an ultrasound photo, tucked in her camera roll right next to that vineyard photo. She’s 8 weeks pregnant, and she says she’s so glad she waited.
I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. I know people who waited and ended up struggling with infertility for years, and I know people who skipped trips and got pregnant right away and don’t regret it for a minute. What I do know is that it’s not a crazy question to ask. It’s okay to want a little bit of time just for you and your partner, before you add a baby to the mix. It doesn’t make you selfish, it doesn’t mean you don’t want the baby. It just means you’re human, and you want to check those trips off your list before your life changes forever. For me, that was worth it. I still pull up those Costa Rica photos when I’m having a hard day, when the toddler tantrums are too much and I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a week, and I remember that we got to be us first. That’s something I’ll never regret.
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