We were sitting on a tiny balcony in Lisbon, sharing a plate of pastel de nata and watching the trams rattle by below. My husband had just gotten back from the bakery with coffee, and I was scrolling through a group chat where a friend had posted a photo of a positive pregnancy test. I looked up from the phone, then at him, and said, “Do you think we should wait? Just a couple more vacations first?”
It was a real question, not a rhetorical one. We had been married for two years, and our life together had become a series of short, brilliant trips. A long weekend in Amsterdam in the spring. A week in Croatia that we’d saved for all year. This current ten days across Portugal. We had a rhythm, and it was a good one. The idea of pausing it—of trading cheap flights and late dinners for prenatal vitamins and early bedtimes—felt like slamming on the brakes just as we were picking up speed.
The problem was that we were also starting to feel the weight of the word “wait.” It had been our default answer for a while. Wait until we’ve seen Japan. Wait until we’ve done this, until we’ve seen that. And honestly, I started to wonder if we were waiting for the vacations themselves, or if we were waiting for the feeling that the vacations gave us—the sense that our life was full and free and entirely our own.
There’s a particular kind of anxiety that shows up when you start thinking about timing a pregnancy. It’s not just about biology, though that’s part of it. It’s about identity. For years, I had defined myself by my independence. I traveled with a carry-on. I could navigate a foreign city without a plan. I could sleep in hostels or nice hotels, depending on the budget, and adapt to either. The thought of giving that up—even temporarily—felt like losing a version of myself I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to.
So we did what we always did when we had a big decision to make. We made a list. Not a pros-and-cons list, but a wish list. We wrote down everything we wanted to do in the next two years. It wasn’t just travel. It was things like “learn to make proper pasta,” “see our niece more often,” and “start a side project.” Then we looked at it honestly and asked ourselves which items would be genuinely harder with a baby, and which ones we were just using as reasons to delay.
That was the clarifying moment. Because the pasta thing? Doable with a baby. Seeing our niece? Absolutely. The side project? Maybe harder, but not impossible. Even the trips—the good ones, the meaningful ones—didn’t have to vanish. They just had to change shape. A week in a rented cottage with a slow pace and a washing machine might not be a sunrise hike in Patagonia, but it could still be a family adventure. The only thing that had to disappear was the fantasy of endless, unstructured freedom. And that fantasy, I started to realize, was already fading.
I also brought it up with my doctor at my annual checkup. I remember sitting in the exam room, the paper crinkling under me, feeling a little silly asking for advice on vacation timing. But the doctor didn’t blink. She said something that stuck with me: “The vacations will happen. The question is whether you’re ready to start a different kind of planning.” She wasn’t pushing us one way or the other. She just pointed out that waiting for the “right time” is a loop that never closes. There will always be another trip. Another project. Another reason to wait another six months.
We didn’t make a decision on the balcony that day. We finished our pastries, walked along the water, and talked about the friend’s pregnancy announcement. I admitted I felt a pang of envy when I saw the photo, which surprised me. I had been so focused on what I’d lose that I hadn’t paid attention to what I might be hungry for. My husband said, “I’m not in a rush, but I’m not scared anymore either.” That was enough for us.
We decided to take one more trip—a deliberate one. We booked a trip to Japan for the following spring, knowing full well that it might be a “last hurrah” or that it might turn into a trip where I spent mornings throwing up in a hotel bathroom. We made peace with both outcomes. We also set a loose timeframe: we’d start trying after that trip, unless we changed our minds, which we were allowed to do. Giving ourselves explicit permission to change our minds made the decision feel less like a trap.
Now, a few years later, I have a toddler and a stack of passports that have gotten more use than I expected. We did make it to Japan, and yes, the timing ended up being right. We’ve also been on a few trips since our daughter was born, and they’ve been completely different experiences. There were pictures of us exhausted at a rest stop in Italy while she napped in her car seat. There was a meltdown in a museum in Barcelona that I still laugh about. And there was an evening in a small village in France, sitting outside a bakery while she ate a croissant and waved at every person who walked by, that felt more like a vacation than any sunrise hike I ever did.
I think about that question—should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of vacations?—and I realize the answer is entirely personal, but the framework is useful. Don’t ask yourself if you’re ready for a baby. Ask yourself if you’re ready to stop waiting for the conditions to feel perfect. Ask yourself if you’re okay with trading a list of future trips for a different kind of richness. The pandemic of “not yet” is a comfortable place to live, but it doesn’t have a moving day.
We’re still figuring it out. Some months we miss the spontaneity, the days when our only obligation was to a dinner reservation. Other months, I watch our daughter discover something as simple as a train passing by, and I wonder what we were so worried about. We haven’t taken that second big trip we’d planned for the year after she was born. Life got busy. But we’re already talking about where we’ll go next, and this time, we’re bringing her. The list of places keeps growing, but the waiting—the anxious, clawing kind of waiting—has finally stopped.
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