We Have Two Trips Planned This Year. Should I Hit Pause on Trying for a Baby?
My matcha latte went cold 20 minutes ago, there’s a crumb of sea salt chip stuck to the corner of my laptop, and I just closed out of a group chat that’s got me overthinking, again. The chat pinged when I was folding socks: my college friend Sarah just announced she’s pregnant, due next October. Everyone’s blowing up the chat with heart emojis, then someone – it was our other friend Jess, who had her baby two years ago – piped up and said “Wait, what about you, Mia? You’re next right? Why you putting it off?”
I told her we have Japan in April, the beach house with my family in July, we’re just waiting till after both, and she replied “Oh, that makes sense, just don’t wait too long!” Which is the thing everyone says, right? The little loaded comment that hangs in the air even after the emojis stop.
Me and Sam have been talking about kids for a year and a half. I got my IUD out last fall, we originally said we’d just stop preventing and see what happens, but then my aunt texted out of the blue last January saying she got the Outer Banks beach house again – the one we went to every other year when I was a kid, she only can lock in the week every five years, and all my cousins are coming, the one who lives in London is flying in just for that week. It’s not something we can just reschedule. Then a month after that, Sam got a bonus at work, and we booked the Japan trip we’ve been daydreaming about since we binged that food documentary on Netflix in 2021. We skipped getting the new car he needs (his Civic has 160k miles and a crack in the windshield that won’t go away) to afford it. We’ve been putting $50 a month into a snack fund for Japan, for God’s sake.
It’s not like we’re putting off kids forever. We’re just putting off actively trying for seven months. But everyone has an opinion. My mom brought up “aging eggs” over Thanksgiving dinner last month, right between the turkey and the green bean casserole. I wanted to sink through the floor. Sam’s cousin went through a miscarriage last year before she had her baby, and she pulled me aside at Christmas and said “I know it’s just two trips, but I’d give anything to go back and start trying sooner. Don’t risk it.” I nodded and thanked her, but I left that conversation feeling sick, like I was already making a mistake I’d regret forever.
I have a friend Lila who got pregnant unexpectedly right before her two-week trip to Italy a couple years back. First trimester hit her so hard she couldn’t keep anything down, not even water. She spent the first six days in their Rome Airbnb throwing up, couldn’t go see any of the stuff she’d planned. She still complains about it sometimes, jokes that the only thing she ate the whole trip was plain crackers from a corner corner store, and she never even got inside the Colosseum. When I told her I was thinking of waiting, she said “Wait. Wait as long as you can. I love my kid more than anything, but I wasted that trip I saved for five years, and I’ll never get that back. You don’t need that regret.”
It’s so weird, the way people make this black and white. Either you want a baby more than anything and you drop everything to try right now, or you care more about stupid vacations than you do about being a mom. Why can’t I want both? I do want to be a mom. I daydream about a tiny kid with Sam’s curly hair, stealing my fries off my plate. I even have a hidden Pinterest board with nursery ideas, don’t tell anyone. But I also want to walk 8 miles a day around Kyoto, stopping at every little temple and matcha stand, without stopping every 20 minutes to pee and find a place to sit down. I want to stay up till 1 a.m. drinking too much sake with Sam in a tiny Tokyo bar, no bedtime, no nursery monitor to get back to. I want to lay on the beach at Outer Banks for eight hours a day, reading a dumb romance novel, without my back hurting so bad I have to go inside after an hour. Is that so bad?
I brought this up to my OB last month, when I went in for my yearly checkup. She leaned against the exam table, gloves still on, and said “Medically, there’s no reason you can’t wait. It’s totally personal.” Then she slid this thick pamphlet about fertility after 30 across the desk, and I suddenly wanted to cry. It felt like even the medical person thought I was being reckless, right? I stuffed the pamphlet in my purse and left, and it’s still sitting there under a pile of old receipts, I haven’t opened it.
I still don’t know what the right answer is. I wake up at 2 a.m. some nights, panicking that I messed up, that I’ll wait these seven months and then it’ll take two years to get pregnant, and I’ll look back and think why did I do that. But then other days, I’ll pull out the polka dot swimsuit I bought for the beach, or find my beat up blue travel adapter for Japan under the couch, and I think why should I rush this? Life changes so fast, everyone says that. Once we have a kid, nothing is ever just me and Sam again, and that’s good, that’s what I want. But do I have to rush to get there? Why do I have to feel guilty for wanting one little last chunk of time that’s just ours, before everything shifts?
I still don’t have a neat answer. I still scroll the infertility subreddit at 10 p.m. when I can’t sleep, looking for someone to tell me I’m right. But yesterday, Sam and I were driving home from the grocery store, and he was playing that silly Japanese pop playlist he made for the trip, and the sun was coming through the windows warm on my arms, and I thought whatever happens, this is where I am right now. I’m not hurting anyone by waiting. I’m just taking the trips we saved for. That’s enough, for now.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » We Have Two Trips Planned This Year