We Kept Saying “After One More Vacation” Before Getting Pregnant — Here’s What Changed My Mind
The last evening of our trip to Portugal, my husband and I sat at a tiny seafood restaurant near the coast, sharing a plate of grilled sardines and a bottle of vinho verde. The sun was still up at 9 p.m., the tables were filled with families—grandparents, toddlers smashing bread, teenagers scrolling—and I felt that familiar pang of longing, followed immediately by the familiar counter-thought: But we have two more vacations planned.
“So,” Marco said, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Are we actually going to try when we get back, or are we waiting for the fall trip to the Azores?”
I didn’t know. We’d been saying versions of this for almost a year. First it was let’s wait until after the wedding. Then let’s enjoy a few trips alone. Then we already booked this one, so it makes sense to go first. But that night, sitting there, it hit me that the vacations were not the real reason—they were just the most convenient ones.
Part of me actually believed that once I had a child, my life would narrow into something unrecognizable. Every travel guide, every child-free couple I knew, every exhausted new parent post reinforced a story that went like this: Once you have a baby, you can’t do anything again. So do everything now. And “everything” apparently meant eating tapas at odd hours and hiking volcanic trails, as if those things would evaporate from the earth the moment I held a newborn.
What made it harder was that I couldn’t tell if I was being wise or just scared. Wisdom said: A baby changes everything, so why not do the big trips first? Fear whispered the same sentence, but with different intentions behind it.
The practical insight I needed—and I didn’t find it until months later—was that both things can be true. A baby does change everything. And also, people take babies to Portugal. The two statements don’t cancel each other out. But I needed to see it, not just hear it.
We got home from that trip, and I made a small plan. Instead of deciding whether to go immediately or wait forever, I asked myself a much smaller question: If I got pregnant right now, and the Azores trip had to be postponed or restructured, would that actually be terrible? Not ideal, but terrible? I realized the answer was no. The trip would still exist. It might even be better in some ways—I’d just be carrying a small human around instead of a daypack.
That’s the thing about the vacation-delay pattern. It doesn’t actually protect anything. It just keeps the gate closed a little longer. And if you’re not careful, there’s always one more gate.
I had a friend who traveled to Thailand with her eight-month-old. She told me, in a very unglamorous way, that it was mostly the same baby care she did at home, just with a different backdrop. She said the week was actually relaxing because there was nothing she should be doing—no work deadlines, no laundry pile, no half-finished home projects. She just changed diapers, breastfed, and looked at temples while her daughter napped in the carrier. She said it wasn’t the kind of vacation where you stay up late eating street food at midnight, but it was real. It counted.
That conversation stayed with me longer than the travel blogs did. Because she wasn’t trying to convince me that parenting is magical or that travel with kids is easy. She was just saying: It’s a different kind of travel, but you’re not locked in a basement.
So why was I so convinced that a couple of carefully curated vacations were the last experiences available to my non-parent self?
Here’s what finally shifted things for me: I stopped asking should I wait and started asking what am I waiting for? That sounds like a therapy exercise, and to be fair, I’m sure some version of it is. But I did it concretely. I sat down and wrote out what the trips represented in four categories: rest, novelty, couple time, and identity. And then I looked at each one honestly.
Rest: I was tired from a demanding job. A vacation felt like the only available cure. But was an eleven-day trip the only way to rest? No. I could take a long weekend. I could build more margin into my weekends. I could ask my husband to take over the grocery shopping for a month. The trip wasn’t the only source of that good.
Novelty: I loved the feeling of waking up somewhere unfamiliar. But that’s not exclusive to big travel. Novelty can be a day trip, a new café, booking a different neighborhood in the same city. And honestly, babies are extremely novel—you never know what’s going to happen next. Not always in a good way, but definitely novel.
Couple time: This one was legitimate, but I had to admit that Marco and I had a whole life of couple time. We had dinner together almost every night. We went for walks. The real question was whether we’d still find a way to connect after a baby. That question couldn’t be solved by taking two more trips. It could only be answered by living through it.
Identity: This was the big one, the one I didn’t say out loud. I was worried that becoming a mother would swallow the version of myself that could spontaneously go abroad. But here’s the reality—that version of me was already getting older. I don’t mean biologically. I mean that I was already becoming someone who valued sleep more than late nights, who wanted a houseplant collection over hostel dorms, who checked flight prices less and less. The trips were a kind of tribute to a self I was already saying goodbye to, and no number of vacations would make that goodbye final.
In the end, we didn’t wait for the Azores. We booked it anyway, and then we didn’t try to plan around it. We just gambled and bought a flexible cancellation rate on our flights. It was a small, silly compromise, but it broke the pattern of waiting for a perfect window that was never going to arrive.
And then the strangest thing happened. We went to the Azores, and I found out I was pregnant two weeks before we flew. I spent the whole week exhausted, surviving on white bread and ginger tea, sightseeing in slow motion. It was not the trip I’d pictured. It was its opposite. But I was there, breathing in the salt air, and the world didn’t end. In fact, the mountains looked the same. The hydrangeas were as blue as the pictures. The stew was good. I just couldn’t hike as far, and that was okay.
That was six months ago. I’m postponing certain things now, but mostly the short menu of dates at unfamiliar restaurants and the ability to jump out of bed before the coffee kicks in. The Azores are still there. Portugal is still there. The list of places I want to go hasn’t shrunk. It just lives in a different time zone.
So if you’re sitting with the same question—should I wait for one more vacation before getting pregnant?—I won’t tell you the answer, because I don’t know what your life looks like or what your losses and fears actually are. But I will suggest a different question, the one that helped me: What is the vacation really protecting, and is it already gone?
Sometimes the thing we’re saving for isn’t the thing we’re saving at all. And sometimes the best proof that a life can hold both travel and children is to just carry something small and heavy into the airport someday and find out.
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