Should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations? What I learned
I was wiping oatmeal cookie crumbs off my kitchen table last Tuesday when my phone buzzed with a text from Lila, my college roommate. “Me and Mark just got back from our second big pre-baby trip—Yellowstone, remember? Everyone’s saying we should wait another two years to do the Patagonia hike I’ve always wanted before we start trying. What do you think? Should I wait to get pregnant after the couple we already had?” I paused, my hand hovering over the crumpled napkin, and glanced at the stack of pre-baby photo albums on the shelf behind me: Costa Rica 2018, Portugal 2019, our own two vacations we’d checked off before we ever talked about waiting longer.
When my husband and I got engaged, we made a loose plan: get married, take two trips we’d been talking about since we started dating, then start trying for a kid. We didn’t want to jump straight into parenthood right after the wedding, and we both love traveling, so it felt like a fair compromise. We checked Costa Rica off first—hiked cloud forests, drank cold beer on the beach at sunset, came home with sunburns and a roll of film we still haven’t developed. Then Portugal, six months later: ate too many pasteis de nata, wandered around Lisbon’s cobblestone streets until our feet ached, stayed in a tiny guesthouse with a cat that slept on our windowsill. We crossed both off our list, just like we planned.
Then the comments started. At family cookouts, aunts pulled me aside and said, “Why rush? You’re young, go see the world while you still can.” Coworkers who already had kids told me, “Once you have a baby, you’ll never get a trip like that again. Wait another year, go to Japan like you’ve been talking about.” I went home that night after Portugal and scrolled Instagram for an hour, seeing reel after reel of people talking about their 10-stop pre-baby bucket lists, and suddenly I was convinced I was making a mistake if we started trying now. I spent a week lying awake at night, wondering if I’d resent my kid if I never got to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, if I’d spend every family vacation for the rest of my life wishing I’d done it kid-free first.
My husband just shrugged when I brought it up. “We already got the two trips we wanted,” he said. “If we want to go to Japan after the kid is older, we can go.” But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to check one more box. So we waited. We saved for another 18 months, took the trip to Japan, ate sushi at the fish market, walked around the cherry blossom groves, came home happy and tired. Then we started trying. I got pregnant three months later, and our son was born a year after we got back from Japan.
Three years later, I can tell you what no one told me back when I was wondering whether to wait. The thing is, most of the “you’ll never travel again once you have a kid” talk is just exaggeration. Yeah, travel is different. You can’t spend 12 hours wandering a city stopping at every random museum and wine bar. You leave restaurants early when the toddler starts screaming. You pack three times as much stuff for a three-day trip as you used to pack for two weeks. But it’s still travel. It’s still new sights and good food and time with your partner, just with a tiny person running along in front of you. Last year we went to Paris with our son when he was two. He chased pigeons along the Seine, ate half a croissant for breakfast every morning, and fell asleep in the stroller halfway up the Eiffel Tower. It wasn’t the trip I would have taken in my 20s, but it was better in a lot of ways.
What I do wish someone had told me back then is to ask yourself two concrete questions before you decide to wait longer, instead of just listening to what everyone else says. First, is the trip you want to take something you actually can’t do the way you want it with a kid? If you want to do a 10-day backcountry hike where you carry all your own gear, or a two-week luxury wine tour where you’re drinking every night and sleeping in until 10, that makes sense to do that before you start trying. If it’s just another beach trip or another city trip that you can just as easily do with a kid (or even a baby in a carrier), you don’t need to wait just to check it off the list. Second, are you waiting because you actually want the trip, or are you waiting because you’re scared of how parenthood will change your life? I realized after the fact that a big part of my wanting to wait wasn’t actually about Japan. It was about being scared to give up the life I had, the freedom to go out whenever I wanted, to sleep in on weekends. Waiting an extra 18 months didn’t make that change any easier when it came. It just delayed getting to the new life that I love way more than I ever loved the old one.
Lila texted me back after I sent her all that, and a week later she sent me a screenshot of her plane tickets to Patagonia for next fall. They’re going to go, hike the W Trek the way she’s always wanted, and start trying when they get back. Some people in her family say she’s crazy to wait that long, some say she’s smart for checking it off first. No one’s answer is going to be right for everyone.
I still think about the what-if sometimes. What if we’d started trying right after Portugal, would we have another year of our son being small that we don’t have now? Would I trade the Japan trip for that? I don’t know. Some days I think yes, some days no. Right now I’m packing for a weekend trip to the lake with my three year old, and I just found a half-eaten granola bar in the bottom of his backpack that’s been there since last month. It’s messy, it’s unglamorous, it’s nothing like the carefree trips I took before I had him. But it’s mine. The right answer isn’t that you have to wait, or that you have to start right after your last vacation. It’s just whatever feels right for you, not whatever everyone else tells you you should do.
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