Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
The iced coffee in front of me was sweating through its coaster, and Lila was pushing a piece of feta around her avocado toast like it had personally wronged her. She flipped her phone around to show me a photo: the two of us, squinting into the sun on our girls’ trip to Charleston last spring, and below it, a screenshot of plane tickets to Tokyo, 10 months out. “We’re supposed to start trying this fall,” she said. “But if we push it back, we get this trip, and my grandma’s 80th birthday cruise next summer. Everyone says we’re being stupid for waiting. What do you think?”
I immediately thought back to five years ago, when I sat in that exact same spot, same question swirling around my head. My husband and I had a Costa Rica trip booked for my 30th birthday, the one we’d worked overtime and skipped takeout for two years to save for. We’d also promised my little sister we’d do a 10-day road trip from Seattle to Alaska the following year, for her college graduation. Our doctor told us we were healthy, no red flags, but we heard over and over that you never know how long it will take to conceive, why risk it? My aunt even said, “You can go to Costa Rica when the kids leave for college.” What no one asked us was what we actually wanted.
We ended up waiting. We spent 10 days in Costa Rica, I hiked three miles up a waterfall to go swimming, ate three empanadas for lunch every other day, stayed up until 1am drinking local rum on the porch of our cabin, didn’t have to get up to feed anyone, didn’t have to plan around nap schedules. On the road trip, we got lost in a national forest outside of Portland, camped on a beach with no cell service, hiked 8 miles in one day just because we felt like it. That time was just ours, the kind of unstructured, impulsive time you don’t get once you have a baby relying on your every step. I came home, we started trying, and it took 10 months to get pregnant. If we’d started when everyone told us to, we would have been well into my pregnancy by the time the trips rolled around, and we would have canceled both.
That doesn’t mean waiting is the right choice for everyone, though. I have a friend Sarah who got pregnant the first month she started trying, right after she booked her dream trip to Morocco. She went at 14 weeks, swapped mint tea for non-alcoholic beer, took more breaks than she planned, and still had the time of her life. She has photos of her baby bump against the backdrop of the Sahara that she still posts every year. Another friend, Mae, didn’t wait. She and her husband had a trip to Patagonia booked, started trying anyway, got pregnant right away, had a first trimester that was so bad she couldn’t get off the couch for six weeks, and they had to cancel. They sold their tickets, lost almost all their money, and they still mention it, four years later, not in a bitter way, just as the thing they gave up that they never got back.
What I tell people who ask me this isn’t that you should wait or you shouldn’t. It’s to work through it with three small, concrete steps that cut through all the noise from other people. First, write down one sentence for each side: what you will regret if you go ahead and start trying now, and what you will regret if you wait. For Lila, the sentence if she didn’t wait was, “I’ll regret missing my grandma’s cruise when she might not be here for the next one, and I’ll regret never hiking Mount Fuji the way I imagined it, just me and my husband.” The sentence if she waited was, “I’ll regret it if we have trouble getting pregnant and we wasted 18 months.” Writing that down makes it far clearer than any 20-point pros and cons list that just ends up repeating what other people told you.
Second, go ask your doctor your specific question, not the general one you read on Reddit. If you’re 29 with no history of infertility, waiting 18 months isn’t going to make any difference for 90% of people. If you’re 37 with endometriosis, that’s a completely different calculation that only your doctor can help you work through, based on your actual health history. Third, don’t let other people’s priorities become yours. When people say “you can travel with kids, it’s fine!” that’s true, but it’s not the same as traveling with just your partner, before kids. No one is asking you to choose between travel and kids, just whether these specific trips, right now, are worth the small wait.
I saw Lila last week, she posted a photo of her plane tickets to Tokyo stuck to her fridge with a avocado magnet. She and her husband decided to wait 16 months to start trying. They know there’s no perfect answer. They know they might end up struggling to conceive later, that this choice could be harder than they expect. But they also know that if they don’t go, they’ll wonder, every time they see a photo of Mount Fuji, or when they look back at grandma’s birthday, what it would have been like.
I still have that photo of me from Costa Rica, taped to the inside of my junk drawer, sunburnt and grinning, mud on my calves. My son is four now, we’re planning a family trip to Costa Rica next year, and it’ll be wonderful in its own way. But that trip I took when I was 30, just me and my husband? It’s mine, and I never would have it if we hadn’t waited. Right now, that’s enough.
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