“Should I Wait to Get Pregnant Until After Our Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take”
My sister-in-law called me on a Tuesday evening, right in the middle of bath time. I could hear the echo of the bathroom, the splash of water, and my four-year-old asking for the blue cup, not the green cup, for the third time. My sister-in-law, who doesn’t have kids yet, said, “Okay, I have a weird question. Luke and I were thinking about trying next spring, but we also want to do a big trip to Portugal in September and maybe a long weekend in Montreal before that. Is it stupid to push the timeline back just so we can travel? Like, is that a waste of time?”
I held the phone between my ear and my shoulder, handed over the blue cup, and thought about it. It’s a question I’ve heard from several friends now, usually whispered over coffee or texted late at night. It always sounds the same: We know we want a family, but we also really want to do these two trips first. Are we being selfish? Are we delaying the inevitable? Should we just go for it and skip the vacations?
The easy answer is “no, it’s not stupid to want to travel.” But the real answer, the one I’ve learned watching my own kids and the parents around me, is a little more complicated. Because the question isn’t really about the vacation itself. It’s about what we think the vacation will give us.
I remember sitting on the couch with my husband, years ago, doing the exact same mental math. We had a trip to Japan on the calendar and a stack of fertility pamphlets on the coffee table. I kept saying things like, “We won’t have freedom again for eighteen years, so shouldn’t we cherish this?” and “I just need one more break where I don’t have to think about anyone else.” The problem was, the break never actually felt like enough. Every Sunday night before a trip, I was already stressed about the next thing. I was so desperate to store up rest and spontaneity that I couldn’t enjoy the rest I actually had. The trip to Japan was wonderful and exhausting, and we came home more tired than when we left.
There’s a quiet truth about waiting for the “right time” that nobody tells you: it keeps moving. You say, “We’ll try after the wedding.” Then it’s “after the promotion.” Then it’s “after we fix up the guest room.” A friend of mine kept pushing her timeline back because she wanted to do one more marathon, then a move to a new city, then a six-week sabbatical. She’s now forty-two, has two beautiful kids, and loves them more than anything, but she told me recently that she wishes she had stopped treating her life like a checklist. She said, “I thought I needed to be done with a certain version of myself before I could become a mom. But I was just scared to let that version go.”
That’s the thing about a vacation when you’re trying to decide whether to have a child. It’s not really about the trip or the cost or the time off work. It’s about the fantasy that you can still be the person who just picks up and flies to Lisbon on a whim. And you can be that person. You just can’t be that person and be a parent to a newborn at the same time. But that doesn’t mean the trip is a waste. It means you need to be honest about what the trip is for. If you’re going to Portugal to soak up long, lazy breakfasts and sleep until nine and wander museums without a stroller, great. Take the trip. Book it today. But don’t expect those long breakfasts to reduce your anxiety about becoming a parent. They won’t. They might even make it worse, because you’ll be sitting in a sun-drenched café, feeling that time is running out, and the vacation will feel like a countdown instead of a pause.
If the real goal is to feel rested and ready, a vacation isn’t the most reliable tool. I know that sounds like a downer, but think about it. The best preparation for the unpredictability of a child is to practice being comfortable with unpredictability now. That doesn’t mean you need to throw your travel plans away. It means you adjust how you think about them. Maybe you plan the trip, but you also plan for one deliberately inconvenient day—one day where you have no itinerary, get lost, eat lunch at 4 p.m., and have to deal with the fact that the rental car broke down. Do that three times, and you’ll have a much better sense of what parenting actually requires than any number of planned-out vacations.
The other unspoken angle here is the physical and emotional reality of conception itself. A friend of mine waited for the “perfect” cycle—the one after her summer holidays, after she’d had enough sleep, after she’d finally cut back on caffeine. It took her eighteen months to get pregnant, and she spent all eighteen months wishing she hadn’t spent the first six waiting for an ideal version of herself. It wasn’t that she should have started earlier; it’s that she had built up this idea that her body needed to be in a state of total calm before she could even try. The truth is, bodies don’t care about your vacation schedule. They care about sleep, food, and low stress—but the “low stress” part gets harder when you’ve locked yourself into a timeline.
I want to be careful here, because I know some people reading this will say, “But I’m not ready, and that’s valid.” It absolutely is. There is a difference between “I’m not ready because I want to travel” and “I’m not ready because I’m not ready.” You can’t rationalize your way through the second one. But if you’re asking whether to wait for a couple of vacations, you’re probably already in the “mostly ready” camp. And in that case, the vacations are a distraction from the real question, which is: “Can I handle one major, life-changing, non-refundable commitment without having everything lined up perfectly?” No one else can answer that for you. But I can tell you that I’ve met a lot of parents who took the trip first, and a lot who didn’t, and I’ve never heard a single one say, “I regret the timing because I didn’t have the right number of Instagram-worthy beach photos.” I’ve heard plenty say, “I’m tired and I miss sleep and I haven’t been on a plane in three years, but I don’t need a plane to feel like myself anymore.”
What changed for me wasn’t the decision itself. It was the realization that parenthood doesn’t cancel the person you were before—it just reorganizes them. You don’t lose the part of you that loves travel; you just start measuring travel in different increments. We took our daughter to a small mountain town when she was eleven months old. We couldn’t go on any scenic hikes, we ate a lot of room-service sandwiches, and our main activity was watching her nap in a hotel crib. It wasn’t a vacation in the old sense. It was a trip with a miniature, unpredictable boss. And somehow, that was more fun than the fancy trip we’d put off years earlier, because I was finally present. I wasn’t trying to bank a memory for a future that hadn’t happened yet. I was just living in the one that had.
So if you’re sitting there with two trips booked and a pregnancy test in your drawer, here’s my grounded advice: take the trips. Take all of them. Order the wine, stay out late, sleep in, buy the impractical souvenir. But take them knowing that no amount of rest you store up now will ever feel like enough. You’ll still be tired when the baby comes. You’ll still feel overwhelmed. You’ll still think, “Why didn’t I appreciate that last free weekend more?” That’s not a sign you didn’t wait long enough. That’s just what happens when you care about someone else more than you care about your own itinerary.
And if you decide not to take the trips, that’s fine too. Just don’t romanticize what you’re giving up. A vacation is a vacation. It isn’t a hedge against future exhaustion, and it isn’t a soul-deep requirement for good parenting. It’s just a week of paid time off and maybe a nice hotel pool.
I’m still not sure my sister-in-law heard me over the sound of the bath splashing. She said “Let me think about it” and then asked what toys my daughter likes for her upcoming birthday. But I saw her a few weeks later, and she mentioned they’d booked the Portugal flights. They’re going in September. And she said, “We decided to stop waiting to feel ready. Because we’re probably never going to feel ready. We just decided to start living like parents who also take vacations.”
That phrase stayed with me. Parents who also take vacations. Because that’s what you become. You don’t choose one life and lose the other. The question was never “Should I wait?” It was “Am I willing to stop pretending that a checklist will ever make me feel calm?” It won’t. And that’s okay. The calm comes later, out of the chaos—usually on a Tuesday evening, in a bathroom, when you’re just trying to find the blue cup.
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