Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The chipped ceramic mug sweats through the coaster on my kitchen table, and Lila leans forward, picking at a crumb of my 3-year-old’s half-eaten banana bread. “So,” she says, twisting the new silver of her engagement ring, “should I wait to get pregnant after our two vacations this year?” I pause, because I’ve been here, sitting across from someone older and wiser five years ago asking the exact same question, wondering if wanting two weeks of sun and bad street food before I start trying makes me a bad future mom.
Lila and her partner worked overtime for two years to save for these trips: a two-week backpacking trip through the Balkans this summer, a long weekend in New Orleans for their first anniversary in fall. They’ve both been working nonstop since the pandemic, no real breaks, no time just the two of them without answering emails from their bosses at 9pm. Her mom keeps asking when they’re going to “get serious” about starting a family, her fertility app pop-ups keep warning that her odds drop every year she waits, and she’s torn. Half of her says she should just get started, the other half says she’s earned this time before life changes forever.
I tell her about when my husband Dan and I were in this exact spot. We had a two-week trip to Japan booked three months out, then a big family camping trip in the Rockies two months after that. All our friends were having kids left and right, my aunt kept making comments about “my clock ticking” at every Thanksgiving, Dan and I had wanted kids for a year already, but we’d been planning that Japan trip since we were dating in college. We debated for weeks: start trying now, and we could end up heavily pregnant for the camping trip, or sick with first-trimester nausea through Tokyo. Wait until after both, and that adds another six months onto the timeline, maybe more if it takes a while to get pregnant.
We ended up waiting. That trip was everything we dreamed of. We slept until 9am every day, wandered around Kyoto temples for hours without stopping to change a diaper or calm a tantrum, ate sushi at 10pm at a tiny hole-in-the-wall, got lost in Tokyo and didn’t panic because we had nowhere to be. The camping trip, I got to stay up until 1am around the fire drinking beer with my cousins, went on a 10-mile hike with my dad that I would have never been able to do if I was pregnant. Then we got home, started trying, and it took eight months to get pregnant with our son. I had a couple of weeks of panic there, thinking I’d messed up by waiting, that I’d wasted the time I had.
But looking back, that wait was the best choice we could have made for us. The thing I never see talked about in all these fertility and parenting thinkpieces is that the time before you have kids is the only unbroken time you’ll get with your partner for a very long time. The first 18 months after our son was born, we didn’t have a single conversation that didn’t involve nap schedules, diaper sizes, or where we put the extra pacifiers. That time we had on those trips wasn’t just “fun” – it was filling our cups up enough to get through the hard first year, when we were both exhausted and snappy and barely hanging on some days.
When Lila asked for actual advice, not just a story, I didn’t give her that vague “follow your heart” line everyone tosses out. I told her to pull out her notes app and write two short lists, one for each choice, with specific outcomes instead of general fears. For example, instead of writing “waiting is bad for my fertility,” write “my doctor said my fertility is normal right now, waiting six more months doesn’t change my overall risk by much, and that’s a risk I’m okay taking.” Instead of “starting now will ruin the trip,” write “if I get pregnant this cycle, I’ll be 18 weeks on the Balkans trip, I’ll have to cut out the 3-day hike I planned, and I’ll probably can’t drink the local wine I’ve been looking forward to. Is that a trade off I want?” That exercise alone made it clearer for her what she actually wanted, instead of just listening to everyone else’s opinions.
I also told her there’s no one right answer. I know a woman who got pregnant right before her honeymoon, spent the whole time sick in a hotel room in Paris, and she said it was still worth it to start trying when she was ready. But for most people who are asking this question, the fact that you’re asking means you’re already leaning towards waiting. You wouldn’t be wondering if you didn’t want those trips to be what you dreamed of.
My son bangs on the kitchen door again, yelling for apple juice, so I get up to let him in. He climbs right into Lila’s lap, covered in dinosaur stickers, and she laughs and ticks his feet. Last week she texted me that she and her partner decided to wait to start trying until after both trips. Her mom still makes comments sometimes at family dinners, but she turned off the fertility app notifications on her phone, and she’s already broken in her new hiking boots for the Balkans.
I don’t know how things will go for her – if it’ll take a month to get pregnant, or a year, or more. I still have days where I wonder if we should have started trying sooner, if we’d have a second kid already if we hadn’t taken that trip. But most days, when I’m folding a million tiny socks or breaking up a fight between our toddler and the dog over a stuffed squirrel, I think about that two weeks in Japan, walking around the cherry blossom groves with no schedule, no one needing anything from me. I don’t regret it for a second. We got our time, and that’s enough for right now.
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