Should I Wait To Get Pregnant Until After My Planned Vacations? What I Learned From My Choice
Folding salt-crusted beach towels on my back porch last month, my phone buzzed with a text from my best friend Lila. “Just got the positive pregnancy test,” it said. “But we canceled our Portugal trip to start trying. Did I mess up?” I brushed a crumb of granola bar off the screen and leaned back against the siding. Three years ago, I’d been asking myself the exact same question: should I put off starting our family until after we checked a couple dream vacations off our list?
My husband and I got married in 2021, still shaking off the weird, locked-down fog of the previous two years. We’d had two trips planned for years before the pandemic hit: a two-week road trip around the Pacific Northwest, where we wanted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail section from Mount Rainier to the Columbia River Gorge, and a week in Oaxaca City, where my husband had worked on an organic farm when he was 19 and still talked about the mole he’d eaten at a street cart every Sunday. Almost everyone we talked to told us to skip the trips and start trying right away. My mom kept leaving voicemails about my “ticking clock” – I was 30 then, and she’d had me at 28, so waiting two years felt reckless to her. A coworker even told me I was being selfish, that I’d regret putting my travel wishes ahead of having a healthy baby.
We went to my OB for a pre-conception appointment anyway, and I brought the question straight to her. She didn’t give me a hard yes or no. She did a full workup, checked my AMH, asked about my cycle, any history of fertility issues in my family. When everything came back normal, she said, “Waiting 18 to 24 months for a couple trips isn’t going to change your outcome for 90 percent of people in your position. If this is something you’ll regret not doing, it’s a reasonable choice.” That was all the confirmation we needed. We booked the trips, put active trying on hold, but started making small, steady changes to prepare anyway: I started taking a prenatal that day, we cut back on heavy drinking, my husband swapped his four-a-day coffee habit for two, we started walking three times a week. We didn’t just put life on hold while we waited.
The PNW trip was everything we wanted, messy bits and all. We hiked 8 to 10 miles a day, camped in a $30 tent that leaked halfway through the first rainstorm, ate gas station burritos for lunch every day, I got poison oak on my ankle that itched so bad I cried in a grocery store parking lot. There was no one we had to check in with, no nap schedule to stick to, no need to hunt down a clean changing table or a kid-friendly menu. When we got to the coast at the end of the trip, we sat on a driftwood log and watched the sun set, and I remember thinking I couldn’t do this if I was pregnant. Not the way we did it, anyway. I would have been too uncomfortable, too worried about hurting the baby, too tired to keep up with the loose, spontaneous itinerary we’d thrown together. Oaxaca came six months later: we stayed in a 100-year-old guesthouse with no air conditioning, wandered the woven blanket markets for five hours a day, drank mezcal with a local weaving family we met, stayed up till 2 a.m. talking about nothing important. That trip, I didn’t once think about babies or timelines or what came next. I just was there, with my husband, in a place we’d both wanted to visit for half our lives.
When we got home, I had a month to overthink it. What if we’d started two years earlier, and it took a year to conceive, we’d already be pregnant now? What if something goes wrong, and this was a stupid mistake? I talked to a couple other friends who’d waited, and one told me she’d always had that what-if in the back of her head when she skipped her trip to start trying, and that what-if was way harder to deal with than the few extra months of trying ended up being. That made sense to me. What I’ve realized since then is that most people asking this question already know what they want to do. They just need permission to not listen to all the people telling them they’re wrong for prioritizing travel now.
I tell people who ask me now to do three specific things before they decide. First, go to a pre-conception appointment, get your own numbers. Don’t go by generic social media statistics about age and fertility. If you have factors that mean you shouldn’t wait, adjust your plans: take a shorter trip, go now instead of waiting a year, don’t put it off for half a decade. But if you’re healthy, and you just want to take one or two trips you’ve saved and planned for years, that’s okay. Second, don’t put preparation on hold. You can start prenatals, make small healthy lifestyle changes, get all your pre-conception tests done while you wait. You don’t have to be actively trying to be preparing, which takes a lot of the anxiety out of waiting. Third, ask yourself honestly: will I resent skipping this trip if I have a baby now? If the answer is yes, that resentment will hang around longer than any extra time you might get trying to conceive. It’s not selfish to avoid that.
We started trying right after we got back from Oaxaca, and it took eight months to get a positive test. I’m 14 weeks now, and I still have our crumpled, coffee-stained PNW map taped to our fridge, with all our stops marked in faded blue pen. Lila ended up booking a small babymoon to the Portuguese coast for next spring, after her baby comes, and she says she’s okay with whatever happens. I still get the occasional comment from family about how I should have started sooner, and I don’t argue anymore. I don’t know what will happen with this pregnancy, I don’t know what travel with a toddler will be like in a couple years, and I don’t know if we made the perfect choice. But I do know I don’t have any unspoken what-ifs sitting in the back of my head. I got two trips, two years of just being us, no rigid schedules, no one relying on me for everything, and that’s enough for me right now.
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