Support & strategies sought

Next Saturday, I will be attending a baby shower for the friend I wrote about here. I am looking forward to the shower in one way: I will get to see my friend, the guest of honor (who I'll call "L"), and other friends who I don't see often since I moved from Tucson to Phoenix.

In other ways, though, I am dreading the shower. And I will confess that I haven't even bought a gift yet, when usually I would have done this weeks ahead, for the fun of it, especially for a baby girl. Just haven't been able to bring myself to set foot in Babies R Us, where she is registered.

I think anyone who has struggled with infertility can relate to my feelings of dread. A baby shower is one of the worst possible places to be for a woman who cannot have a child of her own. The last one I attended was in April 2009, around the time when we first started treatment. (I wrote about it here.) Parts of it were hard, but overall, I found it tolerable. We had just started using medical intervention, and though I am a pessimist by nature, I actually still had some hope that, with the help of medications and IUIs, we would conceive.

It has now been almost 10 months since that last shower. We are no longer doing intervention or actively TTC. I still think a lot about TTC, but I spend far more time now trying to come to terms with the probability that I will never have a baby of my own than I do dwelling on the day-to-day minutiae of TTC. It's a very different place to be, mentally.

This particular shower will be harder for me in several ways than a baby shower for another friend might be. (Hey, I am invited to another baby shower, for another friend in Tucson, the following Saturday! Maybe I should attend both so that I can compare and contrast and decide if this one truly is/was uniquely difficult.) First, as I mentioned in the post I wrote when L first told me about her pregnancy, L and her husband married the same year that MM and I did, and they actually started TTC several months after us. Unlike us, they weren't even sure whether they wanted children when they married.

Second, as I also write about in that post, L's due date is the same due date I would have had if my early miscarriage in August 2009 had not happened. This fact will make it especially hard for me not to dwell on my own loss. And L is having a girl. At this point, we would happily take any child, male or female, but both MM and I have expressed a preference for a girl in our many conversations about our future child.

Finally, though a couple of the friends who will be at the shower know that we have been TTC and/or that we would like to have children, none of them know that we spent a lot of last year doing intervention. None of them know about my miscarriage. So it likely wouldn't make any sense to them why I might be upset. Thus, I am determined NOT to show any outward signs of distress. . . . not only because of this, but also because I don't want to cast a pall on a fun shower for L.

So, ladies who have faced similar situations in the past. . . . give me some ideas and strategies for dealing with this event. L is a close enough friend that non-attendance is not an option, particularly given that she checked with me before setting the date to see if I was available and that she knows I will be in Tucson next weekend for unrelated reasons regardless.

Any advice will be appreciated.

P.S. Why is it that some days are so much harder than others? Some days I feel like I am fine and happy with my life as is, and then I feel OK with the idea that I will never have a child of my own. Other days, I feel very sad and low, and it's all I can do to get through the day without crying. (This is VERY unlike me, as I almost never cry. . . . or perhaps now I should say, I almost never cried before the past 22 failed cycles of TTC.)