From menopause to meaning: Women’s reflections on navigating midlife

Midlife has been framed through biomedical deficit narratives that emphasize decline, alongside a competing healthy-aging narrative that casts decline as something to be managed through individual effort; yet emerging scholarship calls for more inclusive, embodied, and intersectional approaches that center women's lived experiences. This qualitative study challenges deficit-based narratives of midlife by exploring how women negotiate between these narratives as they navigate this transition. We interviewed 27 women aged 39-57 using semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis revealed three central themes: (1) reimagining 'midlife' - revealing tensions between societal expectations and personal agency, (2) embodied experiences of aging -navigating bodily changes while confronting medical dismissal and gender bias, and (3) evolving relational roles across diverse family structures. Participants actively negotiated deficit and healthy-aging narratives, describing midlife not as inevitable decline but as a period of profound reflection and redefinition. Many contested the 'midlife' label itself, challenged ageist and sexist expectations, and reclaimed bodily autonomy despite healthcare systems that frequently dismissed their embodied knowledge. These findings demonstrate how midlife is shaped by intersecting systems of power-ageism, sexism, and medical authority-yet also reveal possibilities for resistance and renegotiation. This research offers a more specific account of how midlife women negotiate between deficit and healthy-aging narratives, while also navigating broader relational narratives of family, gender, and caregiving, contributing a starting point for the new narratives on aging women this literature has called for. Future research must prioritize intersectional approaches with racially, economically, and culturally diverse samples to fully capture the complexity of midlife transitions.