Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Few Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
The sun spot on the coffee shop table is still warm when Lila pulls out her phone and pushes it across the table toward me. Her nose is pink from two weeks hiking the Algarve, and she’s still got a shell necklace she bought from a street vendor around her neck. The screen shows a notes app page titled “Baby Names” scrawled with 12 options, crossed out and rewritten a dozen times. “So,” she says, stirring her oat latte so hard it sloshes over the edge onto the napkin. “Everyone keeps telling me we’re stupid for waiting. Should I wait to get pregnant until after we do our next two trips?”
I remember sitting where she is five years ago, same question buzzing around my head. My husband and I had already locked in a 10-year high school reunion cabin trip with my oldest friends, something we’d been planning since we graduated, and our five-year anniversary trip to Italy. We’d put down non-refundable deposits on both, and I was 33. My mom kept leaving newspaper clippings about fertility decline on my porch. My cousin, who’d just had her first baby, texted me every other day saying “You’ll never want to travel again once the baby comes, just get started.” I stayed up until 1am one night scrolling TikTok, reading story after story of people who waited and struggled to conceive, and my chest hurt so bad I could barely breathe.
We ended up going. I called my OB for a 15-minute check-in, just to go over my numbers. I had regular cycles, no known fertility issues, and she told me a six-month wait wasn’t going to move the needle one way or another for me. So we signed the leave forms, packed our bags, and went. The cabin trip was messy: we slept on lumpy bunk beds, I got poison ivy on my ankle from hiking off-trail, we drank too much cheap beer and stayed up talking about how we thought our lives would be at 33, back when we were 17. Italy was even better: we didn’t set an alarm for 10 days. We ate pasta at 10pm, walked around Rome at midnight because it was too hot during the day, climbed the Duomo without stopping every five minutes to adjust a carrier or negotiate snacks. We got lost in Venice and ate three gelatos in one day just because we could.
When we got back, we started trying, and got pregnant the first month. Our son is three now, and I think about that choice all the time when people ask me this question. No one talks about the quiet resentment that can build before you even meet your baby. I have a friend who started trying before her big six-week trip to Japan, got pregnant right away, had severe first-trimester hyperemesis that meant she couldn’t fly. She lost every dollar she’d put down, and she told me she spent the first three months of her pregnancy feeling angry, even though she wanted that baby more than anything. It wasn’t logical, it was just there, all that planning gone in a second.
When people ask if they should wait, I don’t give them a yes or no. I tell them to do three small concrete things first. First, book that 15-minute check-in with your OB or fertility provider, just to get your own actual risk. Don’t go by what your aunt says or what TikTok tells you. If you’re 37 and have PCOS, the answer might be to start trying now and rebook the trips. If you’re 32 with no issues, a six-month or even year wait is almost always fine. Second, write down the actual trade-offs, not just the vague fears. How much money would you lose if you start trying now and can’t go? Can you rebook the trips, and how much would that cost? If you wait, what’s the actual worst case that would come from that, per your doctor? Third, sit down with your partner and ask each other a straight question: if things go wrong, will you blame the other person for the choice you make? If you wait and it takes two years to get pregnant, will you hold that against each other? If you start now and can’t go, will you resent the pregnancy a year from now?
That last question is the one no one thinks to ask. We all assume we’ll be fine whatever happens, but unspoken disappointment can sink into a relationship faster than you think, especially when you’re already dealing with the stress of trying to conceive or early parenthood. Those vacations aren’t just just fancy trips to check off a bucket list, for most people. They’re the last big stretch of time you’ll have for a long time where you only have to show up for each other, not for a tiny person who needs you every second of every day. People say you can have that with kids, but it’s not the same. It’s not the same to be loose and unplanned and a little selfish when you’re a parent, and that’s okay. That selfishness before kids fills up your cup a little, so you have more to give later.
Lila nodded when I told her that, and crumpled the napkin with the coffee spill on it into her bag. She said her and her partner’s two trips are the Inca Trail and six weeks in New Zealand visiting her husband’s family, where his 88-year-old grandma has been waiting to see them since 2015. They saved for those trips for three years, cutting out takeout and weekend day trips to save the money. Everyone says they can go with the baby, but that would triple the cost, and grandma doesn’t know how much longer she has. It’s not just a vacation for fun, it’s something that matters more right now than starting next month.
We walked out to the bus stop together, and she said she’d book the OB check-in that night, and talk through the questions with her husband over dinner. Last Tuesday, a postcard showed up in my mailbox postmarked Cusco. It’s a blurry photo of a llama standing in front of a mountain, and it says “We’re here. We’ll start when we get back.” I stuck it on my fridge next to my son’s crayon drawing of a dinosaur.
Some days I wish we’d had our son a little earlier, so he could have met my grandpa before he died. Some days I’m so glad we had those two trips, just the two of us, no diapers, no schedules, just us. There’s no perfect timeline, no right answer that works for everyone. Right now, for Lila, waiting feels right. And that’s enough.
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