Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned
The condensation on Lila’s iced oat latte is dripping onto the stack of hiking brochures spread across our coffee shop table. She twists her new engagement ring around her finger, taps the photo of the Grand Canyon rim, and asks the question she’s been turning over for three months: “So should I wait? Everyone says we’re crazy to delay trying just for two vacations.”
I get it. I sat right where she is three years ago. When I got married at 31, the pregnancy questions started before the cake was cut. My husband and I had two trips planned: a 10-day trip to Japan that we’d spent 18 months saving for, picking up extra shifts at work, skipping takeout to put away cash. Then a Christmas ski trip to Vermont with our best friends, something we’d been joining for five years straight.
Every other conversation had a hint: “Don’t you want to start before you’re too old?” “What if you struggle to get pregnant and you wasted a year?” My mom even offered to pay us to cancel the Japan trip and start trying right away. I went back and forth for weeks. I had the ovulation app downloaded, had my prenatal vitamins ready, and the night before what was supposed to be our first month trying, I sat on the couch after walking our old beagle, and couldn’t bring myself to open the app. I turned to my husband and said, “I don’t want to spend the whole trip hiding in restaurant bathrooms because of morning sickness. I don’t want to skip the raw uni at the Tokyo fish market because of food safety rules. I don’t want to cut the hike up to the mountain shrine short because I get winded walking up a flight of stairs. I worked too hard for this trip.”
He nodded. We pushed the start date back to after both trips.
We went to Japan, and it was everything I wanted it to be. I ate street food at 10 p.m. after walking for 8 miles, I stayed up late drinking sake with the inn keeper in Kyoto, I hiked for three hours to see a hidden temple, no diaper bag, no nap schedule, just us. The ski trip was the same: I carried my own ski bag up three flights of stairs, fell three times on a black diamond, drank hot toddies by the fire until midnight, no need to be up at 6 a.m. for a toddler. When we got home, we started trying, and got pregnant the first month. My daughter is three now, and we haven’t had a trip alone together since.
People will give you all sorts of absolute advice on this question. Some will say any delay is reckless when fertility is on the line. Others will say you have to get all your fun in before baby ruins everything. The truth is, it’s all about what fits your life, and there are concrete things you can sort through to figure it out, instead of just going with what your aunt says at Thanksgiving.
First, pull out a calendar and map the timeline, don’t just guess. If you get pregnant this month, when is your due date? Does it fall right in the middle of your first trip? Would you be traveling in your first trimester, when most people are at their most tired and nauseous, or your third, when most doctors don’t want you traveling far from home? I have a friend who got pregnant before her honeymoon, she spent the entire week in Mexico lying on the bed with a garbage can next to her, because her morning sickness never let up. She doesn’t regret having her baby, but she still says it’s a trip she’ll never get back, and she wishes she’d waited six months. If you’d be fine rescheduling or canceling the trips with no hard feelings, then go ahead and start trying now. If those trips are something you’ve been planning for years, with specific things you want to do that you can’t do pregnant or with a newborn, that’s a good reason to wait.
Second, be honest about your own fertility situation, not the generic stuff you read online. If you have PCOS, or you’ve had issues with fertility in the past, or your doctor has already flagged concerns based on your health, a 12 month wait might not make sense for you. Go over the timeline with your actual OB, get their input specific to you, not what a random influencer says. If you have no known issues, and you’re healthy, a 6 to 12 month wait isn’t going to make that big of a difference for most people. That’s what my doctor told me, anyway, and that helped me stop panicking about “wasting time.”
Third, accept that vacations after baby are just different. That’s not a bad thing; I love our family beach trips now, watching my daughter build lopsided sand castles all day. But I’m still the one getting up with her at 6 a.m., I’m still the one packing all the snacks and extra clothes and calming her down when she face-plants into a wave, I don’t get to spend three hours reading a book by the pool like I did in Kyoto. If you want that relaxed, just-the-two-of-you time, there’s no shame in getting that in before you add a baby to the mix. It’s not selfish, it’s just making space for the life you want right now, before everything shifts.
Lila left the coffee shop that day, texted her fiance that they were going to wait. She posted that photo from the Grand Canyon two weeks ago: she’s covered in red dust, holding a cold local beer, grinning so wide her eyes crinkle. Next spring she’ll go to Thailand, then they’ll start trying. I don’t know if it’ll work out exactly how they want it to. I don’t know if they’ll get pregnant right away, or if they’ll have to wait longer than they hope. But I do know she won’t spend the rest of her life wondering what that trip would have been like, if she’d skipped it for a timeline someone else gave her. For right now, that’s enough.
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