Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
I’m wiping goldfish crumbs off my kitchen table this morning, coffee gone cold under my mug, when a text pops up from my best friend Lila. It’s a screenshot of a TikTok that says “any woman who waits to get pregnant for a vacation is an idiot” followed by her question: “Should I actually wait? We’ve had these two trips planned for two years. Everyone’s on my case about it.”
Five years ago, I was sitting right where she is. My husband and I had put a down payment on our first house, paid off our student loans, and locked in two trips we’d daydreamed about since our wedding: two weeks in Japan, where we planned to hike lower Mount Fuji trails and eat our way through Tokyo street stalls, then a long weekend in northern Scotland to see my husband’s 88-year-old grandma, who’d just been diagnosed with early dementia. Our OB asked if we wanted to start trying before the trips, or wait. Everyone we knew had an opinion: my mom said we were young, wait, my aunt said 32 isn’t that young, don’t risk it, my cousin who struggled with infertility said we should start trying immediately.
We ended up waiting. We went on both trips. I ate all the raw sushi I wanted, hiked 8 miles in cold rain one day, stayed up until 1 a.m. drinking whisky with my husband’s cousins in a cottage that had no cell service, held my grandma-in-law’s hand while she watched sheep graze in her front field. I would never have been able to do any of that if I’d been 10 weeks pregnant, dealing with the all-day morning sickness I ended up having with my daughter. We got home, started trying, got pregnant three months later. That’s how it worked out for me, but I know it’s not that simple for everyone.
I’ve watched close friends go the other way and end up with regrets. My coworker Sarah got pregnant right before her belated honeymoon in Costa Rica, had a first-trimester miscarriage mid-trip, and spent a week stuck in a foreign country navigating medical care she hadn’t planned for. Another friend started trying before a months-long European backpacking trip, got pregnant right away, spent the whole trip exhausted and too queasy to leave the hotel most days, and still talks about how she wishes she’d waited six months. Of course, I also know people who got pregnant before their trips and had a great time, and wouldn’t change a thing. The messy truth is there’s no one right answer, but there are small, concrete things you can do to figure out what fits your life.
First, pull out your calendar and talk to your doctor about your specific risk, not the general stats you see scrolling social media. If your two trips are six months away, you’re under 35, and you have no known fertility issues, waiting six months is very low risk for most people. If your trips are 18 months away and you’re 37, you don’t have to jump straight to starting trying now. You can ask your doctor for a simple ovarian reserve test to see where you stand, or even freeze a small number of eggs before you go to take the pressure off. That’s a concrete step that takes a lot of the what-if out of the decision.
Second, sit down with your partner and walk through both what-if scenarios out loud. We did this at a taco truck after a family cookout where my aunt grilled me for 20 minutes about being reckless. We talked through both options plainly: If we wait and it takes two years to get pregnant, will we regret the trips more than the extra two years of waiting? If we start trying now and get pregnant right away, will we regret rescheduling the trips we saved and planned for years? For us, the answer was that we’d rather wait and have the trips than get an early start and always wonder what that trip would have been like. For my cousin, who was 36 and knew she had PCOS, the answer was that she wanted a baby more than she wanted the big trip, so she went on a shorter weekend trip instead and started trying. No answer is wrong, but talking it through that way keeps you from making a choice just to please other people.
Third, if you’re tired of people pressuring you, you don’t have to argue or explain yourself. I used this line every time someone brought it up: “We’ve got a plan that works for us” then I immediately changed the subject to their tomato plants or their new granddog. No fight, no over-explaining, just a simple boundary that works.
Lila came over to my porch last night, we drank cheap rosé while my daughter chased our neighbor’s cat around the yard, covered in dirt. She told me she and her husband are going to go on the trips, then start trying. They talked to their doctor, who said it’s totally fine for their situation. I showed her my tattered Japan photo album, the one with crumpled ticket stubs tucked between the pages, and told her I don’t regret a single month of waiting. I also told her if it takes longer than we expect, that’s okay too. No one can guarantee how any of this will go. All you can do is pick the option that leaves you with the least amount of what-if later. Right now, that’s working for Lila and her husband, and it worked for me. It’s still unfolding, one doctor’s appointment and one messy toddler day at a time, and that’s okay.
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