Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
My coffee’s gone lukewarm on the kitchen table, I’m knee-deep in sorting my 4-year-old’s too-small winter pajamas to pass along, when Lila’s text pops up. “Me and Jake booked Iceland next spring and Cabo next fall. Everyone’s on my case that we should just start trying for a baby now instead of waiting. Should I wait to get pregnant after those vacations?” I pause, a faded polar bear onesie in my hand, and think back to five years ago, when I was sitting in this same spot asking myself the exact same question.
My husband and I had paid the deposit on a month-long backpacking trip through Southeast Asia two years earlier, back when we first got engaged. We’d worked extra shifts, skipped eating out for months, saved every extra dollar to do the trip we’d daydreamed about in college lecture halls. By the time we got back from our honeymoon, we were ready to start talking kids, but the trip was 8 months away. My mom called every other week to ask when we’d just cancel, said “what if you can’t get pregnant after? What if you waste your fertile years on a vacation?” My cousin posted a Facebook rant about people who wait to have kids for travel that I swear was about me.
I went to my OB for my annual anyway, and I asked her straight out. I was 28, no history of irregular periods, no fertility issues in my immediate family. She leaned back in her chair and said “There’s no guarantee for anyone, but for you, waiting 8 months isn’t going to change your odds in any meaningful way. If that trip matters that much, go.” So we went. I ate pad thai off plastic plates on the side of the road in Chiang Mai, I got sunburned napping on a beach in Koh Lanta, I got lost for three hours in Hanoi’s old quarter with Jake and we just laughed and ate banh mi instead of panicking. There was no schedule, no daycare pickup line to make, no fever to monitor in the middle of the night. It was just us, for the first and last time we’ll ever have that much unstructured time together. We came home, stopped preventing, and I got pregnant two months later.
That doesn’t mean waiting is the right call for everyone, though. My cousin Sarah waited three years to do two round-the-world trips after she got married, right out of college. She’s 36 now, and just finished her third round of IVF. When we got coffee last year, she told me she regrets waiting. She always assumed she’d get pregnant right away, never thought to check her fertility before she left, didn’t realize her long-term irregular periods were a red flag that would make it harder. She says she’d trade all the photos from the Amalfi Coast for a healthy baby right now. That’s a reality no one talks about when they’re yelling at you on social media for choosing travel over kids, or yelling at you for not waiting for your last hurrah. There are real consequences both ways.
I’ve talked to a dozen other friends in this spot over the last few years, and there are three small concrete things I tell them to do, instead of listening to everyone else’s opinion. First, book a pre-conception checkup before you decide. I don’t mean a big fancy appointment, just 30 minutes with your provider where you lay it all out: “We want to wait 12 months for two trips. What does that mean for me, given my age and health history?” For Lila, that meant she’s 29, no red flags, so her midwife told her 18 months of waiting isn’t a big risk. For Sarah, it would have told her about her low ovarian reserve early, when she still had time to adjust her plans. That’s not something you can guess from generic online articles.
Second, be honest about what those trips actually are, and what you’d be giving up either way. If you’re talking about two 10-day trips over the next year, that’s a very different wait than putting off kids for 5 years to check off 10 countries. If your dream trip is a backpacking trek through the Andes that you can’t do once you have a toddler (or while you’re pregnant) that’s different than a beach weekend 3 hours from home that you can do any time. For me, that month trip was something we could never do once we had kids – we both have limited time off work, we can’t afford to take a month off now, and we wouldn’t want to leave a baby that young anyway. It made sense to go first.
Third, write down two lines on a piece of paper: What do I regret more if I skip the trips? What do I regret more if I wait? Be honest, don’t write what you think you’re supposed to write. When I did this, I wrote that I’d regret missing the trip forever – I’d be that mom who brings it up every once in a while, wondering what it would have been like. I decided even if we had to wait a little longer for a baby, those memories would be ours forever. Lila did this last time we got coffee, and she said she’d regret skipping the trips more than she’d regret a few extra months of trying.
Lila left for Iceland two weeks ago. She sent me a photo this morning of her standing in front of a blue glacier waterfall, rain in her hair, grinning. I saved it to my camera roll, next to my own photo of me and Jake on that beach in Koh Lanta, 5 years ago. I still pull that photo up some nights, when I’m sitting on the couch after my kid’s asleep, tired after a long day of tantrums and spilled milk and leftover mac and cheese I forgot to put away. I’m so glad I went. I don’t regret waiting. But I also know I got lucky. Luck matters more in this than anyone wants to admit. There’s no perfect answer, no right choice that works for everyone. There’s just the choice that fits your life, your health, and what matters most to you right now.
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