My IVF fundraiser was going pretty well. I was promoting it once a week on Facebook and I had several friends who were promoting it on their own Facebook pages, too. One of my friends even acted as my personal cheerleader. Each and every time I posted another fundraiser promotion, she made sure to comment about how great a mom I would make and how anyone who really cared about me should donate. You've got to love friends like that!

I was getting donations from people who I was pretty sure would donate and from people whose donations really surprised me. It was very encouraging. What was discouraging were the number of people who I really thought I could count on who not only didn't donate but who totally ignored me. This included friends and family.

I was raising enough money with the fundraiser that I wasn't so concerned with whether people donated at that point. I just wanted them to show they cared by saying something supportive to me. Soon, the whole thing began to take on the form of a test to me, and not everyone was passing it.

I started to see articles pop up online about people doing just what I was doing and most of the comments on those articles were hateful and insensitive. People were saying it was selfish to want a child so badly that you would have fertility treatments. There were also comments about fertility treatments being frivolous and likening them to plastic surgery. The worst was when one of my step-sons said he would feel weird about donating because it would be like donating money to me to go skydiving. I was hugely insulted. I began dropping and blocking a lot of people from my Facebook friends list. I figured if they couldn't at least offer a word of encouragement in something so important to me, they weren't really people I needed in my life.

As it turns out, the dropping and blocking were very refreshing! I felt like the good number of people I still had left were the people who really loved me, and I liked having them as part of my new, more tightly-knit circle of supporters.

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