Sonhara Eastman is the creator of the new web series, “Black Girl’s Guide to Fertility.” She penned the series as a way to cope with her own complicated journey to conception after falling in love with the man of her dreams and getting married. Eastman recalls hearing her grandmother speak about her own issues while giving her testimony in church when she was a little girl. “People probably thought I didn’t understand what was going on but I did. I remember my grandmother getting up in church and saying doctors said I would never have children, but I had five kids,” she said.
“My grandmother had my mom at 32, which is young by today’s standard but back then that was old,” Eastman said.
After becoming a woman, then a wife, and going through her own issues becoming pregnant, Eastman says no one else was talking about infertility. “My husband and I started being intentional about becoming pregnant and it wasn’t happening. My OB-GYN put me on some medicine to increase my chances of getting pregnant. After a year without results, I was told to see a fertility specialist,” she said.
Like most women, Eastman kept her struggles to herself. She says the constant questions from friends and family on when she and her newlywed husband were planning to have a family only made her personal struggle towards fertility harder.
“Initially I didn’t tell anyone and hadn’t planned on it. My husband and I went to a funeral and he told everyone that I wasn’t feeling well because of the fertility to drugs and I was furious. I didn’t feel like that was his right to share. Even though he was going through the process with me, everything being done was happening to my body. It felt like an invasion of privacy,” Eastman reveals. After she was forced to speak about the issue she decided while still in the middle of the journey to write about it and “Black Girl’s Guide to Fertility” was born.
In the series, the main character Ava, played by Raney Branch, is newly married and excited about the possibility of having a baby with her husband. Unlike Eastman Ava is able to show her emotions and share them with her friends and family. “With the character, I was able to put a lot of emotion in the conversation where I didn’t get a chance to do that for myself. To be able to put that emotion into Ava and allow her to speak her mind was important to me,” she says.
The fertility conversation has come to the forefront recently with stars like Gabrielle Union and Michelle Obama publicly sharing their accounts of infertility issues. Eastman says her goal with the new series is simple. “To me, success is starting a conversation and that’s what we are doing. The response so far has been amazing. We’re looking forward to hearing the feedback from the series premiere on Jan. 18th.”
Watch the “Black Girl’s Guide to Fertility” premiere on YouTube Jan. 18 at 7 p.m.
You can subscribe to Black Girls Guide to Fertility channel here:
