Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? What Actually Helped Us Decide
The question didn’t come up in a romantic moment. It came up on a windy afternoon in Portugal, sitting on a low stone wall while my husband and I shared a sad, overpriced sandwich and tried to figure out if we’d make the next train. He was checking the map on his phone, and I was staring at a seagull that looked more confident than either of us. Then he said, “So if we don’t get pregnant before the Colorado trip, we can still ski, right?”
I knew exactly what he meant. We had two trips on the calendar: one to the Algarve, and one to Colorado in October. I was at the point where I could either refill my birth control prescription or let it run out. It was the kind of decision you assume you’ll make over wine, but we were making it over stale bread and a train schedule.
Part of me wanted to wait until both trips were over. I didn’t want to spend our big beach week napping in a rental car or throwing up on a scenic cliff walk. I had built up these trips in my mind as a last stretch of air before we became parents. And part of me thought that was exactly the problem.
Everyone had an opinion. My sister said don’t wait, because if you wait for the right time, you’ll wait forever. A coworker said wait, because you’ll be miserable on the plane and you won’t enjoy the food. My doctor said it was medically fine either way, but she mentioned that at 34, if I wanted more than one child, the “just wait a few months” could stretch into something bigger. That sentence landed differently than the others. It wasn’t urgent. It was just honest.
Still, I wasn’t ready to decide based on a vague sense of a biological clock. I needed to know what we were actually afraid of.
So I made a list. Not a pro-and-con list, because those don’t work when one side involves a person who doesn’t exist yet. I made a list of the concrete things we were worried about. For me, it was feeling sick on a vacation I’d been looking forward to for a year. For him, it was not being able to ski. That was it. We weren’t worried about money or jobs or where we would live. We were worried about throwing up and missing a chairlift.
Once we said it out loud, it felt smaller. We looked at the actual dates instead of the abstract idea of “a vacation.” If we started trying in early summer, the Portugal trip would land at around six to eight weeks. That could mean exhaustion and nausea, sure. Or it could mean nothing at all. The Colorado trip would be around fourteen weeks, which is often the point where people feel decent again. If we waited until after Colorado, we were looking at a much later birth and a much longer gap before the next phase of our lives. That was okay too. But it wasn’t clearly better.
We made a simple rule: we would not cancel a trip because of a negative test, and we would not cancel a trip because of a positive one unless a doctor said we had to. We already had flights and lodging. If I was pregnant, I’d eat crackers on the plane and we’d find a bathroom when needed. If I wasn’t, we’d drink wine on the beach. Both versions of the vacation were still a vacation.
That rule helped more than any chart or app. It gave us a way to stop asking “should we?” over and over again. We decided that the trips were happening no matter what, and the only thing we’d adjust was how we showed up for them. That sounds small, but it changed the pressure. I stopped treating the calendar like a trap and started treating it like a map we could move around on.
I also thought about something from my years of teaching second grade. The kids who did best in my class weren’t the ones who waited for the perfect moment to answer a question. They were the ones who raised their hands, got it a little wrong, and then figured out the right answer on the spot. The children who waited for certainty usually stayed quiet all year. I didn’t want to make that same mistake with something that mattered much more than a reading comprehension question.
So we stopped hormonal birth control, but we didn’t tell anyone. That was important. We didn’t want family members turning every future phone call into a “did it work yet?” check-in. We did some practical things instead. We switched the Colorado lodging to a refundable rate in case I needed to come home early. I checked travel insurance for the Portugal trip to see if morning sickness would qualify as a reason to cancel. It didn’t, which made me laugh. I called my doctor and asked if I needed any extra vaccines before traveling, and she said no. It felt weird to be preparing for a vacation and a possible pregnancy at the same time, like packing sunscreen and prenatal vitamins side by side. But that’s actually what the period of trying is. It’s a pile of uncertain plans with some hope folded in.
We went to Portugal. I wasn’t pregnant. We hiked along the cliffs, swam in the cold ocean, and ate dinner late, even though the jet lag made it a little blurry. I remember thinking, on the last day, that I was glad we hadn’t waited for this trip to be over to start something else. Not because it was the right long-term decision, but because the trip felt like a gift rather than a gate.
Colorado was different. I was a week late by then, and I didn’t ski. I sat in the lodge with a book and a hot chocolate while my husband took a few runs. It was not what I had imagined when he first asked about the chairlift. But it was fine. It was more than fine, actually. There’s something strange about sitting still in the middle of a vacation you thought you would spend outside. It forces you to pay attention to the place in a different way. I watched a kid fall off a ski lift and get right back on, and I thought, okay.
That pregnancy ended up sticking. We have a son now, and last summer we took him to the same beach in Portugal. It was a completely different kind of trip. We spent most of it chasing him away from the edge of the terrace and negotiating naps. I remember sitting on that same low stone wall, with him asleep in the carrier, and thinking, “This is what we were trying to get ready for?” It wasn’t a disappointed thought. It was more like a recognition that we could never have prepared for this by waiting one more season.
There’s no clean answer to the question of whether to wait until after a couple of vacations. I can tell you what worked for us: naming the concrete fears, making a rule about the trips, and refusing to treat the matter as sacred. We made a decision and then we lived with its consequences, some of which were beautiful and some of which were just exhausting.
I still don’t know if waiting would have made those trips easier. But I know now that there is no perfectly clean window. There’s always another vacation, another work deadline, another reason to push something to the next month. At some point, you raise your hand and hope you get the answer close to right. That’s true for pregnancy, and it’s true for a lot of parenting decisions after it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations