Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Real Perspective
The butter from my grilled corn was dripping through the paper napkin onto my faded denim cutoffs, and Lila was twisting a sealed birth control packet between her fingers on the arm of her chipped Adirondack chair. It was our third night at the shared beach rental we’d booked with our partners, and the sun was painting pink stripes over the dunes when she finally said what we’d all been avoiding talking about. “All our group chats are blowing up asking when we’ll stop vacationing and start making babies. Is it crazy that we still want two more trips before we even start trying?”
Mark, her husband, took a sip of his beer and nodded along. He gets the pressure: his mom had him at 38, after five years of fertility treatments, and she keeps calling to remind them that “your eggs don’t wait for a trip to Portugal.” But all he sees is his brother, who had a kid six months after his wedding, hasn’t had a full night away from the kids in four years, can’t even remember the last time they took a spontaneous day trip without packing three coolers and a pack of pull-ups. “We worked our tails off for four years to pay off student loans,” he said. “We just want a little time to be just us before we add a tiny human that needs everything from us.”
I didn’t give them a quick answer right away, because I was in their exact spot five years ago. My husband and I got married young, both working entry-level retail and graphic design jobs, and we’d dreamed of a two-week trip around Japan since we were broke college students eating ramen off paper plates. All our relatives kept asking when we’d start trying, said we were “wasting our good fertility years” on beaches and temples. I remember lying awake the night before we booked that trip, scrolling through mom blogs that said either “travel before you have kids, you’ll never get another chance” or “stop putting it off, you’ll regret waiting.” No one gave me a straight answer that fit what I was feeling.
We ended up booking the trip, and I still think it was the right call. We ate too much sushi, got lost in Tokyo, fell asleep on a train to Kyoto and missed our stop. When we came home, I stopped my birth control, got pregnant three months later, and I never once looked back and thought I wish I’d skipped that trip to have a kid earlier. Those first few years of newborn diapers and middle-of-the-night feedings were so exhausting, but I never resented my son for taking that special time with my husband away from me, because I already had it.
But I also didn’t sugarcoat the hard part for Lila and Mark. I wanted a second kid when my son was two, and we started trying, and I had two miscarriages back to back. It took another three years to get pregnant with my daughter. I was 32 when I had her, which isn’t abnormally old, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t sit up at night wondering if it would have been easier if we’d waited a year less, tried earlier. It didn’t ruin everything, but it added a lot of stress I didn’t expect.
That’s when I shared the small, concrete things I wish someone had told me back when I was weighing the same choice. First, pull out your phone notes and write two very specific lists, not vague feelings. First list: what exactly do you get out of waiting for these two vacations? No generic “we need more time together” that can drag on for five more years. Lila pulled her phone out right there and typed: 1. Portugal trip we’ve been planning since we got engaged, want to hike the coastal trails and eat dinner at 10pm without a bedtime. 2. Ski weekend in Vermont with just the two of us, no kid gear to haul. That was it, two clear, specific things she wanted. Second list: what exactly do you risk by waiting? Lila typed: I’m 31, have PCOS, doctor said waiting 18 months could lower my chances of conceiving easily. Again, specific, no scary vague phrases to cloud the decision.
Second, if you’re over 35 or you have known risk factors for fertility issues, book a 30-minute pre-conception appointment with your OB before you lock in your timeline. You can get a simple hormone check done, get a real idea of what your timeline looks like, instead of guessing based on what your cousin or your mom says. If you’re under 30 with no known issues, waiting a year or two for a couple of trips is almost never going to cause a problem.
I also pointed out that the big myth people push is that you’ll never get another couple vacation once you have kids. That’s not true. When my son turned 8, my mom watched him for four days, and my husband and I went on that Vermont ski trip we never got to do before kids. It was just as good as it would have been eight years earlier. You don’t have to cram every big trip into your 20s before you start a family. On the other hand, if what you want is the kind of trip where you wander for 12 hours without a schedule and sleep in until 9, that’s almost impossible to do with a toddler or a baby. It’s okay to want that experience before you shift into the full-time demands of parenthood.
What ended up happening with Lila and Mark? They moved their Portugal trip up from next fall to this coming spring, cut their 10-day trip down to seven days, and decided to skip the Vermont ski trip for now. They’ll start trying two months after they get home. It’s a compromise, not a perfect answer. No one can tell them it’ll work out exactly the way they want, just like no one could tell me that when I was in their shoes.
We packed up the grill plates and napkins after that, swatted mosquitoes away from our coolers, and didn’t talk about kids or vacations again for the rest of the weekend. I don’t know what the future holds for them. There’s no one right answer that fits everyone. Some people are ready to have kids at 25 and don’t care about big trips, some people want that time together and it’s worth the small risk. All you can do is make the choice that fits your life, not the one everyone else tells you to make.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations