Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Enjoying a Couple of Childfree Vacations?
I was folding a load of stained baby onesies on my couch last month when my phone pinged. It was a text from Lila, my college roommate, with a photo of her sunburned shoulders against a turquoise Gulf of Mexico background. “Just got back from our second childfree beach trip this year,” it read. “Everyone keeps bugging us to start trying for a baby, but I still have that Europe trip I’ve been planning for years on my bucket list. Should I wait to get pregnant until I check it out?”
I paused, stared at the photo, and thought back to four years ago, when my husband and I were in the exact same spot. We’d just gotten married, had checked two big trips off our list: a 10-day backpacking trip through Portugal where we ate so many pastéis de nata I still can’t look at a custard tart without gaining a pound, and a two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest where we slept in a beat-up tent and hiked until our feet blistered. Everyone had an opinion back then. My mom called every other week to ask when we’d “get serious about starting a family.” My OB offhandedly mentioned that fertility drops after 30, so we shouldn’t wait too long. A cousin of mine posted a reel about how childfree travel is the only real travel, and we’d regret it forever if we had kids before we saw the world.
We ended up sitting on a log at an overlook in Olympic National Park, eating cheap trail mix out of a plastic bag, and I admitted I still wanted one more trip to Japan before we started. He said he did too, but that we could take 10 more trips or zero, and he’d be happy either way. We waited another year, booked Japan, and started trying two months after we got back. It worked on the third try, and now I have an 18-month-old who dumps my cereal on the floor every morning and thinks the best activity in the world is pulling all the toilet paper off the roll.
When Lila asked me the question, I didn’t give her a yes or no answer. I’ve seen both sides. My friend Megan waited five years to check her big round-the-world trip off her list, started trying when she was 36, and ended up doing three rounds of IVF that never worked. That regret of waiting is way heavier than any regret of missing a trip would have been. I also have another friend who got pregnant on her honeymoon, before she got any big childfree trips in, and she told me last month she doesn’t miss it at all. She’s already taken her two kids to Disney and to the Smoky Mountains, and she says those memories are better than any solo trip she could have taken.
So what I told Lila, and what I tell anyone who asks me this question, boils down to a few concrete things you can do to figure it out for yourself, instead of listening to everyone else’s opinions. First, pull out your notes app and write down the real reason you want to wait. Is it because you have a specific trip you’ve dreamed of for years that you know you’ll never be able to do the same way with small kids? Or is it because you’re just scared of being a parent, and the trip is an easy excuse to put off the hard decision? When I did this exercise, I realized my Japan trip was real—I’d wanted to go there since I was a teenager obsessed with Studio Ghibli, and I knew I didn’t want to go when I was 40 dragging three teens who didn’t want to be there. If your reason is specific, that’s one thing. If your reason is just “I want to enjoy being free a little longer,” that’s fine too, but be honest about it, so you don’t end up stringing yourself along for years.
Second, if you’re 30 or older, or you know you have any health issues that affect fertility (like PCOS, endometriosis, or a family history of early menopause), book a 15-minute appointment with your OB before you decide to wait another year or two. They can do a simple blood test and ultrasound to check your ovarian reserve, and you’ll have a clear idea of what your timeline can actually look like. I waited until I was 30 to start trying, and I got that test done before we booked Japan, so I knew it was safe to wait another 12 months. That took all the anxiety out of the trip, so I could actually enjoy it instead of worrying the whole time that I was wasting time.
Third, if you’re on the fence, set a hard deadline. Don’t just keep waiting for the next trip, then the next, then the next. If you want that one more trip, book it for the next 12 months, go, and then start trying when you get back. If that trip gets canceled, or you get pregnant before you go, you can always change the ticket to a babymoon, or go for a week without the kid once they’re a little older. It’s not a one-time-only opportunity.
I went back to folding those onesies after Lila texted, and I thought about those trips I took before my daughter was born. I don’t regret waiting a single day. Those memories of laughing with my husband until 2 a.m. on a patio in Lisbon, of watching the sun rise over Mount Fuji, of not setting an alarm for two whole weeks, those are the little things that get me through the hard days of parenting, when I haven’t showered and my daughter has a fever and I just want five minutes alone. At the same time, if I’d gotten pregnant a year earlier, I wouldn’t regret that either. Vacations don’t stop when you have kids, they just change. Last month we took my daughter to the beach for a long weekend, and we spent the whole time building lopsided sandcastles and eating melting popsicles, and that was just as nice, just different, than any childfree trip I ever took.
Lila ended up booking her Rome trip for next spring, and they’re planning to start trying the month after they get back. She’s 28, no fertility red flags, so that works for her. We got coffee last week, and she showed me her reservation for that little family-run pasta place she’s been wanting to try for 10 years. I told her to go eat every bite, take a million blurry photos, and not rush back. If things change before then, that’s okay too. There’s no perfect answer, just the one that fits what you actually want.
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