Should I Wait To Get Pregnant After A Couple Of Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
I’m leaning against a chipped wooden porch rail in Old San Juan, salt crusting my sunscreen-sticky shoulders, a half-eaten cheese empanada on the rail beside me. My husband’s passed out on the couch inside, sunburned across the nose after we walked three miles to see the old forts at sunrise. My phone pings, and it’s a text from my cousin: “Y’all done having fun yet? When am I getting that niece?” I stare at the text for a minute, then look out at the ocean, where the water’s turning pink from the sunset. Two years ago, we made the decision to put trying for a baby on hold to take two big vacations we’d been planning for half a decade. That day, for the tenth time that year, I asked myself: was that the right call?
We got married when I was 31, and the baby questions started before we even cut the cake. We already had these trips locked in: a two-week road trip around Japan we’d daydreamed about since we were broke college kids eating instant ramen in our dorm, and this trip to Puerto Rico to see my grandma, who’d just been diagnosed with early dementia and was already starting to mix up my name with my mom’s. Our OB told us there was no medical reason we couldn’t try to get pregnant and go—if I caught it early, I’d likely be fine, just skip the raw fish. But we kept talking about it, lying in bed after work, and both landed on the same thought: what if I’m so sick I can’t get out of the hotel room? What if we have to fly home early? What if this is the last time I get to sit with grandma and drink piña coladas on her porch before she doesn’t remember who I am? So we decided to wait: do both trips, then start trying.
My mom stressed about it, saying 31 isn’t getting younger, why put off a baby for a vacation. My best friend, who had two kids under four when we got married, just nodded and said, “I waited two years after my first to take a trip without them, and it’s not the same. Do what you want.” No one had a neutral take, it seemed—it was either “you’re crazy to waste time” or “you have to travel before kids, your life is over once they arrive.” Neither felt quite right.
We got home from our last trip in September, stopped using protection, and then month after month, nothing. That old panic set in: this is what everyone warned us about. We waited too long. I’d sit at my desk at lunch, scrolling fertility forums, beating myself up for choosing beach trips over a baby. At a family dinner a few months in, my cousin even said, “I told you you shouldn’t have waited.” It stung, more than I let on.
I went in for a full workup with my OB, and everything came back normal. It just takes time, she said, for a lot of people. She also told me something that stuck with me: for most healthy women under 35, waiting 12 to 18 months to check trips off your list doesn’t move the needle much on your overall odds of having a healthy baby. The key is that you don’t have to hit pause on all pre-pregnancy planning just because you’re waiting to start trying. That’s the practical part I wish more people talked about when this question comes up.
If you’re sitting where I was two years ago, asking if you should wait, there are a few small concrete things I did that made the choice feel less risky, not more. First, I went to my pre-conception checkup before I left on the trips. We talked about my family history, I got my blood work done, and I knew there weren’t any red flags that would make waiting a bad idea. Second, I started taking prenatal vitamins the day we decided to wait, not the day we started trying. I cut back on drinking except for the trips, and cut out the raw sushi I ate every week at work anyway, just to be prepared. If I’d been over 35, I would have asked for a baseline fertility check, and asked my partner to do a sperm test, just so we knew what we were working with if we ran into trouble after waiting. None of that takes much time or money, and it takes a lot of the “what if” stress out of the choice.
I also came up with a one-line answer for people who pressed about our timeline, that worked better than any long explanation: “We’re on our own timeline.” I didn’t have to defend our trips, or explain my grandma’s dementia, or justify our choice to anyone. It shut down most prying questions right there, and that took a lot of pressure off.
The thing no one talks about is what you actually get from waiting for those trips, that matters after the baby comes. We ate sushi at 10pm after walking 12 hours around Tokyo, we slept in until 11am when we were tired, we changed our entire route last minute because we saw a photo of a mountain hot spring and wanted to go. We never would have done that if I was pregnant, or if we’d had a baby with us. That’s not a knock on traveling pregnant or with kids—it’s just different. And with my grandma, I sat on her porch for three hours every day, drank cheap rum in our piña coladas, ate street food that would have made my OB nervous if I’d been pregnant. That was the last time she recognized me when I visited. She died six months later. If I hadn’t waited, I would have missed that.
Now I’m seven months pregnant, sitting on my couch, the photo of me and grandma on the fridge right above my latest ultrasound picture. I still have days where I wonder what would have happened if we’d started right after the wedding. If we’d run into unexpected fertility issues, waiting would have been the wrong call, and I know that. It’s not the right choice for everyone. But for us, it worked. I don’t have a neat moral to wrap this up in, and I don’t know what the next year will bring. But I have these memories that no one can take, that I get to tell my kid about, that remind me who I am outside of being a mom. Right now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait To Get Pregnant After A Couple Of Vacations