Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? An Honest Parent’s Take
The coffee seeped through the paper cup and onto my wrist at gate 17, JFK, 6 a.m., 2019. I swiped at it with a crumpled napkin and toggled back to my ovulation tracker, the little blue line telling me I’d be fertile the second week of our trip to Portugal. My now-husband Jake leaned over, elbow knocking my carry-on, and held up his phone. His cousin had texted again, all caps: STOP WAITING. YOU’LL JUST KEEP FINDING REASONS TO PUSH IT BACK.
We had two trips booked that year: this 10-day Portugal itinerary we’d planned for our first anniversary, and a 10-day ring road trip around Iceland three months later. We’d been talking about starting a family for six months, had even started tracking my cycle “just to see,” but every time we got close to ditching birth control, someone pulled us aside with a hot take. Jake’s cousin had two kids under 3 and said carefree couples trips would never happen again, period. My coworker, back from maternity leave six weeks, had cornered me by the microwave the week before: “Do every single thing you want now. I haven’t peed alone in three months, let alone wandered a foreign city without a backpack full of goldfish crackers.”
We sat on those plastic gate seats for 20 minutes before boarding, going back and forth. If we started trying now and I got pregnant on the first try, I’d be 10 weeks along in Iceland, too nauseous to hike, too tired to stay up for the northern lights. If we waited, I’d be 31 when we started trying, 33 for Jake, nothing that sounded high-risk on paper, but old enough that my aunt had already made a quiet comment about “not waiting too long.” In the end, we waited. We boarded the plane, and I tucked the tracker in a folder on my phone for six months.
Portugal was everything everyone promises pre-baby travel is. We missed the last train back to our Alfama Airbnb after a fado show and walked an hour along the Tagus, no one checking a monitor, no one panicking about bedtime. We ate pastéis de nata for breakfast three days in a row and spent a whole rainy afternoon in a tiny port wine lodge, sampling 12 different vintages. Iceland was just as good, even with the sinus infection that landed me in a Reykjavik urgent care and made me skip the glacier hike I’d booked six months out. We pulled over at 1 a.m. on an empty stretch of road to watch the northern lights dance, and slept curled up in the rental car for an hour after, no alarm set. I peed on a stick 10 days after we got home, and it turned positive before the timer even went off.
Our son was born in early March 2020, two weeks before New York City went into lockdown. We spent his first six months in a 700-square-foot one-bedroom, just the three of us, no visitors, no trips beyond a walk around the block. I nursed him at 2 a.m. most nights, scrolling through my camera roll from those two trips, and I’d say the same thing to Jake every time: I’m so glad we waited. We never would have gotten that. I bought the whole line: those trips were our last shot at being us, before we were mom and dad, before every plan revolved around nap time and snack cups.
One night, he leaned over and scrolled past all the sunset photos I’d favorited, pulled up the rest of the roll. There I was, red-faced and pouting on a Lisbon park bench, because we’d gotten lost and missed the last entry to the tile museum I’d begged to see. There was the crumpled urgent care receipt from Reykjavik, the photo of Jake eating a gas station hot dog for dinner because I was too sick to go to the restaurant we’d booked. Half the trip wasn’t the perfect, carefree fantasy I replayed in my head. It was just a trip, with good parts and annoying parts, same as any trip.
I met Lila at a stroller walk when our boys were 4 months old. She’d gotten pregnant two months after her wedding, and canceled two pre-planned trips to Oaxaca and Italy, nonrefundable tickets and all. She brought those trips up at every playgroup, like they were a permanent limb she’d cut off to have her baby. She’d spent her whole pregnancy and first year grieving a version of her life she thought was gone forever, and couldn’t believe she’d been careless enough not to wait. Last summer, her mom took the baby for five days, and she and her partner went to Oaxaca anyway. When she came back, she laughed and said it was fun, but they got sunburned and the hotel had no hot water half the time. It didn’t live up to three years of hype. She’d spent so long clinging to the idea of that perfect pre-baby trip that she missed half the small, good stuff in her son’s first year, because she was convinced she’d ruined her life by not waiting.
Over the last four years, at least a dozen friends and readers have asked me this exact question: should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations? It’s never really just about the trips. It’s the quiet fear that having a kid will wipe out the part of you that likes to travel, that likes to stay out late, that doesn’t structure your whole day around a tiny person’s needs. I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, but I have a few small, grounded things I wish someone had told me at that JFK gate.
First, pull the receipts. Open your photos app and scroll through your last two vacations, not just the 10 photos you posted to Instagram. Count the moments that were actually uncomplicated, exactly what you’re craving right now. Almost everyone I do this with finds 70% of the trip is delayed flights, overpriced bad meals, bickering over directions, answering work Slack in a hotel lobby. We romanticize pre-baby travel so much because we’re scared of losing our identity, not because every pre-baby trip is perfect.
If you do decide to wait, name the specific things you actually want out of those trips, out loud, and write them down. Don’t call it “our last chance to have fun.” For me, that list was: hike 8 miles without stopping for a feeding, drink wine with dinner without pumping afterward, stay up late for music without checking a monitor. Those are finite, specific things, not a whole personality. When you frame it that way, you don’t walk into parenthood convinced you’ll never get those things again – you just got to have them once, and you can have them again for a weekend when the kids stay with grandma.
If you decide to start trying now, don’t cancel every trip you have planned. Even if you end up pregnant and tired, even if you have to tweak the itinerary, keep one small, low-stakes getaway on the books – a cabin an hour from home, a night at a hotel in the next town – that’s just for the two of you. It keeps you from carrying that “we gave up everything” weight into the already hard first year. If you’re 30 or older, mention your timeline to your OB before you lock in nonrefundable tickets. Fertility doesn’t care about your flight deal, and that’s not a scare tactic, it’s just a fact most people leave out. My friend Mia waited two years for a round-the-world sabbatical, then needed three years of IVF before she had her daughter. She still doesn’t regret the trip – it got her through the worst of treatment – but she wishes someone had suggested a simple ovarian reserve test first, so she knew what timeline she was actually working with.
Last spring, we took our 4-year-old back to Iceland. We did the Golden Circle, but pulled over every 20 minutes so he could climb rocks and chase sheep. We were back at our Airbnb by 8 p.m. every night, too tired to hunt for northern lights. I didn’t drink beer with dinner because I was on bedtime duty. It wasn’t the same trip we took in 2019, and it was never going to be. But he still talks about the “hot water pools by the snow mountains” every week.
We’re talking about trying for a second next year, and already booked a week in New Orleans for this fall, just the two of us. I don’t know if I’ll get pregnant the month after we get back, if it’ll take a year, or if a work emergency will make us cancel entirely. There’s no perfect call here. The trips don’t make you a more fun person, and skipping them doesn’t make you a more dedicated parent. What sticks around longer than any sunset or wine tasting is the story you tell yourself about why you made the choice you did. Last week I cleaned out a junk drawer and found that old positive test stick, tucked next to crumpled ticket stubs from that first Portugal trip. I didn’t throw either away. I just slid the drawer shut. Both things get to take up space.
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