Should I Wait To Get Pregnant After Taking A Couple Of Vacations? A Mom’s Real Perspective
The chia seeds spilled out of Lila’s avocado toast onto the sunroom brunch table last April, and she twisted her engagement ring around her finger while she asked the question. She and her fiance just put a down payment on a condo, booked a 10-day Portugal trip this fall and a two-week Japan tour next spring, and everyone has an opinion. Her ob/gyn said there’s no medical reason she can’t wait, but her mom keeps texting her fertility stats at 32. Her coworker who struggled to get pregnant told her to start trying yesterday. “I just don’t know,” she said, dabbing chia seeds off her linen napkin. “We’ve been planning these trips for five years. But what if waiting messes everything up?”
I leaned back in my chair and stirred my mimosa, because I’d asked that exact same question six years earlier. My husband and I had just scraped together the last of our student loan payments, booked a two-week Rockies road trip and a week at my aunt’s beach house in Cabo with my sister, and we were standing at that same crossroads. Do we hit pause on trying to conceive, go enjoy the trips we’d spent half a decade saving for, or jump right in and risk a pregnancy ruining the whole thing? My mother-in-law warned I’d regret losing those years of fertility, my best friend said I’d regret never getting the kid-free trip out of my system before diapers and 5 a.m. wake-ups.
We ended up deciding to wait. We got on the road three months later, camped next to alpine lakes, stayed up till 1 a.m. drinking cheap wine by the fire, hiked 10 miles a day without stopping to nurse or change a diaper or hunt down a chicken nugget. We laid on the beach in Cabo and read entire books in one sitting, no baby monitor pinging, no schedule to keep. When we got home, we threw out the birth control and started trying.
That’s where the messy, unspoken part comes in. It took 10 months for me to get pregnant. I turned 34 a week before that positive test, and there were plenty of late nights where I laid awake wondering if we’d made the wrong choice. What if we’d started earlier? What if I’d messed this up for a couple of vacations? But I also knew that if I’d gotten pregnant before those trips, my first trimester would have coincided with the road trip, and I had the most brutal morning sickness imaginable when I did get pregnant. I couldn’t keep down water for the first 12 weeks. I would have spent the whole trip hunched over a camp toilet, miserable, resenting the baby I’d just spent years trying to have.
From that, I’ve got a few concrete things I tell people when they ask this question, no vague “follow your heart” fluff. First, go get a 20-minute baseline fertility check before you decide to wait. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had PCOS, endometriosis, or any other issues that affect fertility, this takes 10 minutes with your doctor, a simple blood test and ultrasound, and it’ll give you actual info to make a choice, not just guess based on your aunt’s friend’s story. If your numbers are good, waiting 12 to 18 months for two trips is almost always low risk. If they’re not, you can adjust your plans before you’ve wasted time you don’t have.
Second, write your start date for trying on the calendar before you book your trips. Don’t leave it open-ended. We wrote “start trying October 1” on our fridge whiteboard before we left for the road trip, and we didn’t add another big trip or push the date back when we got home. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “one more trip” before you start, and suddenly three years have gone by. Locking in the date keeps that from happening.
Third, be honest with your partner about what happens if you get pregnant accidentally. We said upfront that if the birth control failed and we got pregnant before the trips, we’d be thrilled, no regrets. That took the stress off the whole waiting period, and kept us from resenting a surprise if it happened.
The other thing no one tells you is that the trips you’re planning right now won’t happen the same way for at least three to five years once you have a baby. I love traveling with my 3-year-old son, but our last “big trip” was a three-day stay at a lake cabin two hours from home, and I spent more time cleaning up smashed goldfish crackers off the floor than I did relaxing. You can’t do a 12-hour tour of Lisbon castles or a multi-day hike through the Japanese Alps with a toddler, and even if you could, you won’t enjoy it. The kid-free vacation you’re dreaming of right now is only possible right now, before kids.
I also don’t buy the line that “you can travel when kids are older.” You can, of course, but it won’t be the same adventure you’re craving right now. You won’t be the same two people, carefree, with nothing to tie you down but a plane ticket and a loose itinerary. That version of your relationship only exists right now, and that’s worth something.
Last week, Lila texted me a photo from the Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, grinning with a matcha soft serve in her hand. She’s eight weeks pregnant now, started trying right after the trip, and it happened on the first try. She wrote that she keeps scrolling through her photos when morning sickness has her curled up on the couch, and she’s so glad she waited.
I still have that photo of me and my husband jumping into that freezing alpine lake, hair wild, no cares, taped to my fridge. Some days I look at it and think about that 10 months of waiting to get pregnant, and that tiny what if nags at me. But most days, I look at it and remember what it felt like to have that time, just us, before we became parents. There’s no perfect choice, but this one worked out for us, and that’s enough for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait To Get Pregnant After Taking A Couple Of Vacations