Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Real Experience
I was wiping blueberry muffin crumbs off my notebook at my neighborhood coffee shop last spring when my friend Lila’s text popped up. It was a photo of her and her partner Mark, squinting into a Mexico sunset, salt in their hair, a margarita balanced on the rail between them. The text read: “We were supposed to start trying for a baby next month. Is it crazy that I want to wait until after our Vermont fall trip in October? What if we never get to do this again after?”
I’d been there exactly five years earlier. Back then, my husband and I had booked a two-week trip to Japan, something we’d saved for since college, and we’d set a start date for trying to conceive right after we got home. My mom kept calling me every other week, pointing out I was already 28, asking why I was putting it off “just for a vacation.” One of my cousins had gotten pregnant on her honeymoon, had three kids by 32, and told me over brunch that we were just being selfish, putting our fun before our future family.
I met Lila for dinner a week after she got back from Mexico, sun peeling on her shoulders, picking at a plate of truffle fries at our favorite burger spot. She said every person she’s asked has given her a different answer. Her fertility doctor said it’s fine to wait six months if she’s healthy, but her aunt who struggled to get pregnant at 33 says she’s foolish to delay even a month. She said the thing no one gets is that the trips aren’t just “fun.” They saved for two years to take these two weeks off, Mark’s job rarely gives him that much unbroken time off, and if they start trying now, there’s a good chance she’d be eight months pregnant by October, and can’t go hiking or stay in that tiny remote cabin they booked.
I told her what I remembered: when I was sitting in that same spot five years ago, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I skipped the Japan trip, I’d always wonder what it would have been like. We started trying the week we got home, and I got pregnant the third cycle. That trip, where we wandered Kyoto at 10pm eating cold ramen from a street cart, stayed up until 1am talking on a park bench because we didn’t have an alarm to set for daycare drop-off, that’s still one of the first memories I pull up when we’re having a hard week with our 3-year-old. No one can take that away from us.
I’m not here to tell you you should always wait, or that you should never wait. What I’ve learned from talking to a dozen friends and my own OB is that there are a few concrete things to work through that most people don’t spell out. First, be honest about your own health context. If you’re 28 and have never had any fertility issues, waiting six months for two pre-planned vacations isn’t going to meaningfully change your outcome. If you’re 37 or have known issues like PCOS or endometriosis, that’s a different story – a quick 15-minute call to your OB to ask what a reasonable wait would be for you takes almost no time, and it takes the guesswork out. That’s the first thing anyone can do, no overthinking required.
Second, you don’t always have to choose between starting trying and going on your trips. I have a friend who decided she wasn’t going to wait for her trip to Portugal, she started trying anyway, and she didn’t get pregnant until three months after she got back. Most people don’t get pregnant the first month, after all – 80% of healthy people under 35 take up to a year to conceive, so odds are you can fit both trips in before you even see a positive test. If you do get pregnant before the trip, talk to your doctor: most low-risk pregnancies let you travel well into the second trimester, and first trimester travel is fine for most people too. If you can’t go because of complications, you can almost always change the dates to after the baby comes, bring a trusted babysitter or family member along, and go a year later. It won’t be the same, but it’ll still happen.
Third, if the thought of starting trying now leaves you in knots of anxiety about canceling your trips, that’s a clear sign you should wait. Stress doesn’t help when you’re trying to conceive, anyway. If you’re going to spend every morning peeing on a stick and checking your calendar, stressing that you’ll have to lose your deposit and miss the trip you saved for, that stress can make it harder to get pregnant even if everything else is fine. That’s what I didn’t get five years ago – it’s not just about the trip, it’s about the headspace you bring to trying to have a baby. You want to start when you’re not resenting the baby already for making you miss something that mattered to you.
Last month, Lila texted me a photo from that Vermont cabin. She and Mark were covered in fallen leaves, holding mugs of warm cider, the cabin’s hot tub steaming behind them. She wrote “We started trying this week. No regrets.” I texted back a heart emoji, and thought about how there’s no perfect answer here. My cousin who skipped her Italy trip to start trying still brings it up at girls’ night, eight years later, says she wishes she’d just gone. Another friend who waited three years for multiple trips ended up needing fertility treatment that took longer than she expected, and says she wishes she’d started earlier. No one can predict how it’ll go for you. All you can do is weigh the small risks against the small, solid good of getting those memories that are just yours, before you add a third person to every trip you take. Right now, Lila doesn’t know if she’ll get pregnant this month or next year. But I know she doesn’t have that quiet little knot of what if in her stomach. That’s more than most of us get when we’re making this kind of choice, anyway.
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