We were on the last night of our Lisbon trip, sitting at a tiny table with cold sardines and a bottle of vinho verde, when my husband said, “So, do we do it when we get home?” He meant start trying for a baby. We’d been saying “after the next trip” for about a year and a half. First it was after the Azores. Then after the long weekend in Montreal. Then after this Lisbon trip—the one we’d called our “last real vacation as just us” about six times already.
I remember looking at him across the table and feeling this strange mix of excitement and loss. We had planned this trip in a very specific way. Morning coffee at the same pastelaria, a long walk along the Tagus, no itinerary. We told ourselves we were soaking it in. But by the second night, the baby question was sitting there between us like an extra dessert we couldn’t decide on.
Should I wait to get pregnant until after a couple of vacations? That was the question. It sounds like a privilege to even ask it, and I knew that then, too. We weren’t dealing with medical delays or financial uncertainty. We were dealing with the fact that I liked being able to take a two-hour nap in the middle of the day, and that it was hard to imagine trading that in for something I couldn’t yet see.
So we did what we usually did when we didn’t know the answer. We made lists. Not pros and cons, exactly. More like two separate lists: trips we wanted to take before a baby, and trips we thought we could actually manage with a baby. The first list had scuba diving in Croatia, a trek in Patagonia, a long stay in Japan where we could eat at midnight without worrying about a babysitter. The second list had a lot of “maybe” and “if we get a good sleeper” and “when the baby is six months.”
I think we both knew the first list was the real list. We were trying to say goodbye to something, but we weren’t sure we were ready to say goodbye to it yet.
Then we spent the next two months doing what a lot of people do: we kept saying “maybe next month.” We’d check the calendar, realize there was a wedding in October, a possible ski trip in January, and decide it was smarter to wait just a little longer. The problem was, every time we pushed it forward, we didn’t feel relieved. We felt tired. There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from waiting for the perfect window, and it’s worse than the exhaustion of a newborn, if I’m honest.
One evening a friend came over and asked me directly. She was a few years younger, newly married, and she and her husband had been going back and forth about the same thing. She said, “My mother keeps telling me if I wait until I feel ready, I’ll never have a baby. But I also feel like I’m supposed to want to travel now, because once kids come, it’s over.” She was sitting on my couch, holding a cup of tea, and I could see she wanted me to tell her the secret. I couldn’t, because there isn’t one.
What I could tell her was what I’d realized: waiting for a vacation isn’t really about the vacation. It’s about whether you believe your life will feel small after kids. And that’s a real worry, not a shallow one. You can love the idea of becoming a parent and still grieve the version of yourself that can just get on a plane with nothing but a passport and a book.
So here’s what we did, and maybe this is the only practical thing I can offer. We stopped treating vacations and pregnancy like they were opposing teams. We made a rule for ourselves: if an opportunity to travel came up in the next few months, we would take it. But we would try to get pregnant at the same time. Not “after the trip.” Not “once we get back and we’re rested.” At the same time. Because the trip wasn’t actually the obstacle. The obstacle was the idea that we needed to complete a certain number of experiences before we could earn the right to become parents. That’s a real thing people feel, and nobody names it.
It helped to think about what our child would actually need from us. Not a perfectly traveled parent. Not someone who had seen all the cathedrals. But someone who had practiced being flexible, who knew how to enjoy a slow morning, who had learned that plans sometimes fall apart and that’s okay. We already had those skills. We’d spent years building them in airports and train stations and bad Airbnb check-ins.
And it also helped to talk about what we would do with a baby, not what we wouldn’t do. We started a small list of trips that seemed genuinely doable in the first year: a beach rental with my sister’s family, a week at a cabin three hours away, maybe a short flight if the baby was chill. Telling ourselves we could still go somewhere was important. It kept traveling from becoming a thing we had lost, and turned it into a thing that was just changing shape.
We did get pregnant. Not on the first try, and not on the last trip either. It took a few months, which is normal, and suddenly all that careful timing felt a little silly. You plan around a wedding in October, and then you’re standing at that wedding carrying a tiny secret in your purse, not able to toast with champagne. You picture yourself having the baby in June, and instead you end up having the baby in February, during a week when you were supposed to be skiing.
Now I have a three-year-old, and I still think about those Lisbon evenings. Not because I regret waiting those extra months. I don’t. We needed them. I needed to sit with the idea of becoming a mother and not feel like I was losing a second self. But I also know now that the trade was never as absolute as I thought it was. My kid doesn’t care that we didn’t get to Japan before she was born. She cares that we read her the same book a hundred times. And the trips we do take now—short, chaotic, full of snack wrappers and playground stops—are real trips. They don’t look like the ones on that first list. They’re better in some ways, and worse in others.
If you’re asking whether you should wait until after a couple more vacations, I’m not going to tell you to just go for it. That’s too easy. I’m also not going to tell you to keep waiting until you feel fully ready, because that feeling may not come until your kid is in college. The question is not whether you’ll miss traveling. The question is whether you can hold the travel plans and the baby plans in the same hand. We couldn’t, for a long time. We needed to believe that taking a vacation was a way of preparing, not just a way of delaying.
We still argue about whether to book a big trip this summer. My daughter is old enough now to remember things, and we want to give her something good. But we also know the window between “old enough to remember” and “too busy with school and activities” is short, and we don’t want to blink and miss it. So maybe we’ll go somewhere. Maybe we’ll just stay home and build a garden. I don’t know yet.
What I do know is that having a baby didn’t close the door on having a life. It just made the door heavier, and I had to learn to push through it with one arm while holding a diaper bag. And sometimes, on a good day, we all make it outside together and drive somewhere with the windows down, and that feels enough like a vacation to matter.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » We were on the last night of our Lisbon trip, sitting at a tiny table with cold sardines and a bottle of vinho verde, when my husband said, “So, do we do it when we get home