Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Few More Vacations?
We were standing in the driveway, waving goodbye to our friends Jen and Marcus as they pulled out for the airport. They were off to Lisbon for ten days. Lisbon. We’d talked about going to Lisbon for years, but we’d never quite made it happen. I looked over at my husband, Dave, who was still holding the waving hand in the air, a little frozen.
“They’re going to drink all the pastel de nata,” he said, finally dropping his arm.
“We could go next spring,” I said, but even as I said it, I knew the timing felt off. We were in that weird in-between place—the one where you’ve been married for a few years, you have a decent savings account, and the only thing stopping you from a long weekend in Mexico is the fact that you’re trying to decide if you should stop trying not to get pregnant.
It’s a strange question to ask yourself: Should we wait until after a couple more vacations? It sounds frivolous, especially when you consider the bigger picture. But standing there in the driveway, it wasn’t frivolous at all. It was a very real calculation about how much of our current life we were willing to trade for a future one.
The first time we talked about it, we were at our favorite taco place, the one with the sticky tables and the really good salsa verde. Dave had just gotten a bonus at work, and I was between freelance projects. The conversation started with “we should go somewhere” and ended with “but if we’re going to start a family, maybe we should just stay home and save.”
I hate that phrase—“start a family”—because it implies we aren’t one already. But we both knew what it meant.
My sister, Claire, who has a two-year-old and a newborn, had told me to just rip the bandage off. “There’s never a perfect time,” she said, while simultaneously trying to stop the toddler from eating a crayon. “You just do it. And then you adjust.”
But is that true? I wasn’t so sure. She said that as she was wiping mac and cheese off the wall. She said it while wearing a shirt that had a suspicious stain on the shoulder. I loved my nephew, but watching her, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of fear. It wasn’t about the baby itself. It was about the closing of a door.
The door to spontaneity. The door to sleeping in. The door to booking a flight on a Tuesday because the fares were cheap and we didn’t have to ask anyone for permission.
So I started doing what I do best: making a pro-and-con list. Not on paper, but in my head, usually at 3 a.m.
On the one hand, I thought about my friend Elena. She got pregnant right after a big trip to Japan, and she always said she was glad she had those memories to hold onto during the sleepless nights. She talked about sitting in a tiny ramen shop in Kyoto, breathing in the steam, thinking, “This is the last trip before everything changes.”
On the other hand, I thought about my own parents. They had me young. They never went to Europe until I was in college. They didn’t seem bitter about it, but they also didn’t have a lot of stories from their twenties. When I asked my mom if she ever wished she had traveled more, she just shrugged and said, “I got you instead.”
That’s a tough guilt trip to argue with.
The real turning point wasn’t a grand epiphany. It was a Wednesday. A completely ordinary Wednesday. We were at the grocery store, Dave pushing the cart while I threw in a bag of frozen peas and a bottle of wine. It was raining outside, and the fluorescent lights in the store gave everything a washed-out look. We were in the cereal aisle, and I asked him if he wanted the honey-oat or the plain bran.
He looked at me, a box in each hand, and said, “You know, I don’t care. Let’s just get the bran. We’re getting old.”
It was such a dumb, mundane comment. But it hit me. We weren’t old. We were thirty-one and thirty-three. But we were at an age where waiting didn’t feel like a delay anymore. It felt like a choice.
The vacations weren’t the obstacle. The vacations were just a stand-in for a bigger fear: the fear that we weren’t done being “just us” yet.
Dave and I talked about it in the car on the way home, the grocery bags rustling in the back. I told him I felt like I needed one more trip. Just one. To really close the chapter. He was quiet for a while, then he said, “Okay. But we have to agree not to use the trip as an excuse to wait another year.”
That was the practical part. We picked a date in October. We picked a destination—a simple beach town in the Pacific Northwest, nothing too far or too exotic. We didn’t do the honeymoon-style itinerary. We just found a little cabin with a fire pit and a view of the water. We knew we didn’t need to see another ancient cathedral; we just needed to sit somewhere quiet and feel okay with not having an agenda.
And here’s what I learned during those four days of foggy mornings and long walks along the shore: the vacations weren’t about the activities. They were about the absence of responsibility. And I realized that if we waited until we felt completely ready to give that up, we’d never do it. Because no one is ever ready to give up freedom.
But here’s what I also learned, sitting on that cold, damp sand with a thermos of coffee: we could still have this. We might not be able to fly to Lisbon next spring, but we could rent a cabin. We could take a long weekend at the coast. The real ferry schedule might be harder, but the need to just look at the horizon wasn’t going to disappear.
When we got back home, I stopped making the pro-and-con list. I donated the barely-used travel guide for Portugal to the library sale. It wasn’t a sacrifice; it was a recalibration.
We decided to start trying in November. I won’t pretend I wasn’t nervous. When I looked at the little stick, waiting for that plus sign to appear, I had a brief, wild thought about all the trips we wouldn’t take. But then Dave walked in with two mugs of coffee, handed me one, and said, “Well, I guess we’ve got a new destination.”
It wasn’t a perfect line. It was a little dorky, actually. But it felt real.
And that’s what this whole thing comes down to, I think. The question of whether to have a child isn’t about whether you’ve checked off enough items on your travel bucket list. It’s about whether you understand what you’re giving up — and what you’re getting in return. We didn’t wait until we were done wanting to travel. We just got to a point where we wanted something else more. And I think that’s the honest truth.
We’re not pregnant yet. As I write this, we’re still waiting. It might not happen right away. Sometimes I think about that cabin on the coast, and my hand drifts to my still-flat stomach, and I hope we get to go back there someday—with a kiddo in a carrier, maybe, or as a family of four with a bucket of beach toys. We might not make it to Lisbon. But that’s okay. We found a different itinerary. It has a looser schedule, and the hotel amenities are far worse, but the view is pretty good from here. We’re still figuring out the route. But for now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Should We Wait to Get Pregnant Until After a Few More Vacations