A Life Span View: From Young Adult to Late Adulthood
Subject Michelle Honeycutt
Andrea McCabe
Chamberlain College of Nursing

Michelle Honeycutt is age 60 and currently lives in Pekin, IL. I chose her as my subject mostly because of her unique upbringing and life journey so far. She is married with three children and works at The Women’s Center for Health working in the billing department where she has worked there for over ten years. Her parents are in their eighties currently and are residing in Pekin, IL as well. Her husband, Lance Honeycutt, is sixty-three and works as a district manger for Zales Jewelers.
Young Adulthood
Michelle’s story is unique because she became a single mother at twenty-two. She married her first husband at nineteen and felt like she had missed part of her childhood. She felt she missed this not just because she married young, but because her mother became very ill when she was about nine years old. Her two sisters and her had to, “grow up fast” (Honeycutt, M., Personal Communication February, 2013), she said. She did most of cleaning, cooking, and shopping.
When Michelle reached young adulthood she said she felt lost and out of touch with many her age. Developing friendships during this age is very helpful for boosting self- esteem, and those who have close friendships throughout college, tend to deal with stress better (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). She felt she also skipped going out, drinking, and parties, because she had a child. I asked her if she felt any loss with that. She replied, “Yes, I did. I feel that if I had friends I could relate to during that time and even before I had my first child, I may have made different life choices”(Honeycutt, M., Personal Communication February, 2013). She says her parents didn’t seem involved in her life in her twenties. She says they didn’t encourage her to go to college or ask her what she might want to do as a career.
When it came to possible selves for Michelle, she found that she felt the most comfortable being around people she worked with. After she had her first child at twenty-two, she got a job working as a jeweler at K’s Merchandise. This is where she became friends with many of her co-workers and was beginning to feel like she had a true sense of self. She was newly divorced at twenty-four, two years after the birth of her first child. According to Erikson, “…intimacy cannot be achieved until after one’s identity is established” (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). Since Michelle had not fully found her possible self yet, it is logical that her marriage ended as early as it did. Michelle did however find that she did well as a mother, and learned from her parents how not to be one. She says she did well with work because she knew she had to provide for her child and that kept her motivated to make good choices.
Middle Adulthood
While Michelle worked at K’s Merchandise, she came across gender discrimination. She was very pretty, tall, slender, and with blonde hair and blue eyes. Michelle said that she was once introduced to several other district managers who had visited the store she worked at. Michelle at the time said she was always at least number three in sales in the company. One of the district managers she was introduced to said, “Well, no wonder she sells so much, she’s gorgeous.” She replied, “Yes, and I know nothing about jewelry” (Honeycutt, M., Personal Communication February, 2013). She told me that she was often discriminated in this way because she was pretty, that people assumed that her sales were good because of her looks and that it couldn’t of been because she did her job well. She said there was another time she was asked to work at a store for a few weeks that needed help with sales. The manager there would continually call her “babe” (Honeycutt, M., Personal Communication February, 2013) and flirt with her. She said whenever this happened; she always stood up for herself. She said she felt confidant in her job skills, and she still carries that pride with her today. It seems that during this period, Michelle was finding her possible self through her work and building confidence from that.
This confidence seemed to have translated to her relationship with her parents. She said she began to seek guidance from friends mostly because she felt her parents had made many poor mistakes and were continually emotionally abusive and cruel to her and her sisters. She went on to explain that around twenty-eight she ended up emotionally “divorcing” herself from her father because of the emotional pain he caused her. She also found this this abusive behavior to be true in her first husband. When she reported this behavior to the police, nothing was really done about it. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that he U.S criminal justice system ruled that abusive relationships could be used as an explanation for one’s behavior (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). When I asked why she married him, she explained that it was the only type of personality she knew and it seemed familiar to her. This pattern of behavior is interesting and may have lead Michelle to choose her first partner due to her lack of self-esteem which seemed to have been instilled by her father.
Late Adulthood
Michelle remarried when she was thirty-five to her current husband and had two more children with him. After she had her two other children, she stayed home for about ten years and Lance went on the road a lot for work. She explained that she dealt silently with depression that started at forty years old. During that time, she also started experiencing poor sleeping patterns that she believes to be linked to her depression. Diagnosing depression in older adults tends to differ in diagnosing younger adults (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). She remembers feelings of “helplessness” because Lance was not around to help her rear the children. She also felt depressed about getting older and noticing physical changes of slowing down and not keeping up with her children who were still fairly young. This may be termed as dysphoria, which is a main distinction between diagnosing between young and older adults (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). Michelle eventually sought help of a doctor who prescribed her Ambian for sleeping and an anti-depressant. She used this for about eight months until she felt her sleeping patterns were better along with her mood and general outlook on her current life situation. Lance also relocated his job in order to come home more often and stay involved.
An important factor in Michelle’s process of coping with her depression seemed to be her eventual interpretation of her situation. Se explained that she felt strong enough and able enough for the depression to pass, and it eventually did. I would conclude that her internal belief system carried her through her rough period. An internal belief system is what a personal tells themselves for the reason something has happened. The way a person deals with that based on their internal beliefs could carry them through their rough period and then successfully out of it, or keep them there. I feel that for Michelle, her internal belief system worked effectively in her favor.
Now at sixty, she tells me she can feel body changing, getting slower and her telling the same stories a few times over. She says she believes in God and found faith later in life at about forty. She says that because of this found faith, she does not have anxiety or fear about death.
When asked what life advice she would give to someone young, she says to secure you future and much as you can by planning ahead. I feel this advice is sound and seems suitable given her past. She feels that she did not make all the right choices, and after having children she regrets none of those made because she always tried to make the right decisions, even if they were difficult to make. When I listened to her talk about her life, she seemed to be reviewing it in a way that made her seem as though she was ok with everything that has happened and the choices she has made. She seems to be at least starting the process of integrity versus despair (Kail & Cavanaugh, 2010). This process would make sense at her age, and it is the process by which Erikson explains that people later in life often do.
After interviewing Michelle Honeycutt as my subject, I took with me an important conclusion to her story. It is that life choices seem to have a cause and effect, and how we deal with those choices, may either steer us from the “normal” course of human development or veer us away until we settle back into it. This seems to have added a deeper meaning to the common phrase that all human beings are connected. That no matter what we go through and what choices we make, we are all still human.

Kail, R. V., & Cavanaugh, J. C. (2010). Human development, a life-span view. (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub Co.