Miscarriage in your forties

Miscarriage as an older woman in your 40’s!

An intimate reflection on grief, faith, and the fading dream of motherhood while reclaiming her identity as a beloved daughter of God.

In the gentle hush of ordinary living, there exist stories that rarely find their way to light: the stories of older women who have dreamed of holding a child. These women have sacrificed years to secure financial stability and wholeness psychologically, but most importantly, cultivated an unwavering and intimate relationship with God as they put their trust in the One who has sustained them in all their challenges and difficulties as single and Catholic and Christian women. However, when the time seems to have finally come, they only encounter the raw ache of miscarriage.

For many, the experience is compounded by the silence surrounding their grief. Such was my experience when I finally became pregnant at 42 and then miscarried at 8 weeks. The silence that filled my soul stretches into endless nights and days, as if I were suddenly transported to a foreign country where the landscape was unrecognizable and the citizens looked at me as if I did not belong. I longed to fit in and assimilate, yet no one spoke my language. It’s like all the street signs in that country were written in code. You are moving, trying, but you’re never quite sure you’re going the right way. So, you end up feeling both invisible and exposed at the same time. The sense of being abandoned by those around you, your body, your God, and the very dreams that once sustained you becomes your new reality.

According to Dr. Pauline Boss, psychologist and pioneer of ambiguous loss theory: "Grief, especially when unacknowledged by others, can render an individual both unseen and painfully vulnerable, caught between the need for comfort and the fear of being misunderstood or dismissed."

So, dear friend, if you are reading this post, I imagine you carry a kind of sorrow that doesn’t always have words, a loss that arrived later than expected, at a time in life when you thought your story might have turned out differently. I write this as someone who knows the pain. Miscarriage in our forties can feel especially lonely. The world does not always know what to say. Time once a friend, now feels like it’s closing in. And somewhere in the quiet, we begin to wonder whether the promises we once clung to still hold-whether Psalm 139:16, which tells us that all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” truly applies to us.  To this devastation.

This post is not meant to fix anything. It’s meant to sit beside you. To hold space for your story. To honor the deep ache of loss and the invisible weight it leaves behind. But more than anything, it’s an invitation- a gentle journey back to yourself, and the arms of a God who has never stopped calling  “Beloved daughter”.

You are not forgotten.

You are not disqualified.

You are not alone.

Margalita