Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
Last month, I sat across from my friend Mia at our usual corner coffee spot, the one that serves oat lattes that are always too hot and gives out free chocolate chips with every cookie. She pushed her phone across the sticky table, screen showing a screenshot of a fertility Facebook group thread: “I have two vacations booked this year – should I pause trying to get pregnant?” She twisted the end of her sun-bleached hair, the color she got on our girls’ trip to Cabo last spring, and said, “That’s literally me. I have no idea what to do.”
I told her I’d been in her exact shoes three years prior. My husband and I had a 10-day Danube river cruise booked, and we’d been paying it off in $100 monthly installments since our wedding night. We’d just started talking about when to try for our first kid, and every person we asked gave us a different, strongly worded answer. My mom told us to go, have fun, because once you have kids you can’t just wander a vineyard for three hours without someone needing a snack or a diaper change. My cousin, who’d struggled with fertility for years, told us not to wait a single day, because you never know how long it will take. I went back and forth for weeks, feeling guilty for even wanting to prioritize a trip over starting a family.
We ended up deciding to wait. We went on the cruise, I drank local Riesling every night, ate strudel for breakfast, slept until 9 a.m. every single day with no alarm and no one waking me up to ask for milk. When we got back, we started trying, and I got pregnant two months later. I never regretted it. But I’ve also seen it go the other way, so I don’t give people a one-size-fits-all answer anymore. My next door neighbor Sarah, who’s a year older than me, waited for a big anniversary trip to Italy when she was 36, and then it took her three years to get pregnant. She still says she wishes she’d skipped the trip and started sooner. My sister got pregnant by accident two weeks before her non-refundable Hawaiian vacation, and she spent the first week so sick with morning sickness she never left the hotel room, and the whole trip was wasted. Another coworker of mine got pregnant before her beach trip, had zero symptoms, spent the whole week swimming and napping, and it was totally fine.
What I’ve learned is that people love to give black and white answers, but this is one of those decisions that’s all about your specific details. Instead of listening to random people on the internet call you selfish or reckless, you can work through it with three concrete checks, that’s what I told Mia. No vague “follow your heart” advice, just actual things you can do in 20 minutes to figure out what’s right for you.
First, pull out all your booking confirmations and write down the exact amount of money you’d lose if you had to cancel or reschedule. That hard number is way more useful than vague worrying about “wasting money.” For Mia, that number was $7,800. That’s how much she and her husband would lose if they couldn’t go on their Japan trip, because all the flights, the traditional ryokans, and the guided mountain tour were non-refundable. That’s not a small amount for them; it’s the extra they’ve been saving to put towards a down payment on a house. Losing that would set their home buying goals back two years, which is a real consequence that matters more than any forum comment.
Second, text your OB or fertility provider a quick question: “I have X months of trips planned, is waiting that long a problem for me given my age and health history?” Most of the time, they’ll give you a straight answer that’s specific to you, not a generic take. My doctor told me straight up that at 28, with no underlying issues, waiting six months wasn’t going to change anything, so I should go enjoy myself. That took all the guilt off immediately. For Sarah, who was 36 already, her doctor would’ve told her waiting a year wasn’t ideal, which would’ve changed her whole decision.
Third, take five minutes to sit and actually imagine both scenarios, no guilt allowed. First, imagine you wait: you go on your trips, do all the things you’ve been planning for months or years, and then you start trying. What’s the actual worst case that would bother you, not what someone online says should bother you? Then imagine you don’t wait, and you get pregnant before the trips: what’s the actual worst case? For me, the worst case of waiting was that it might take a little longer to get pregnant, but I was okay with that risk. The worst case of not waiting was that I’d be miserably sick the whole trip and waste all that money we’d saved for two years, which I wasn’t okay with.
Mia thought through all that, and decided to wait. Last week, I got a photo from her at Narita Airport, grinning in front of a cherry blossom display, holding a matcha ice cream. She captioned it “worth the wait” and added a little pregnancy test emoji with a cross through it. She knows there’s no guarantee it’ll work out perfectly. They might end up taking longer to get pregnant than they expect, they might have to wait another year, and that’ll be hard. But right now, this is the choice that fits them.
A lot of the talk around family planning makes these small, in-between choices feel like they’re life-or-death moral decisions. If you choose to wait for vacations, you’re selfish, if you choose to go for it regardless, you’re reckless. But most of the time, it’s just a choice between two good things, and you pick the one that lines up with what you can afford, what your body needs, and what you’ve been looking forward to. There’s no perfect answer, just the one that feels right for you, right now.
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