Salon.com > Lisa A. Hedley http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 12:52:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Little people http://www.salon.com/2003/12/17/little_people/ http://www.salon.com/2003/12/17/little_people/#comments Wed, 17 Dec 2003 00:14:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2003/12/16/little_people When my daughter LilyClaire was born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia eight years ago, I was frantic with the need for information. I devoured clinical texts, memoirs, fairy tales and history books, as if the only way I could fathom my child living with this otherwise mysterious condition was to obtain as much knowledge about it as I could. Among other things, I learned that dwarfism occurs as a result of a genetic mutation in 1 out of every 10,000 to 40,000 live births, that most dwarfs are between 4 feet and 4-foot-4, and that they have short limbs, large heads and average-size torsos.

I got closer to understanding the emotional aspects of dwarfism through writing an article for the New York Times Magazine, and making a documentary film for HBO called "Dwarfs: Not a Fairy Tale." The research that went into these projects equipped me with facts that helped me parent my dwarf child, but perhaps more significantly, all of the processing showed me that having a child who is different was not the dire, unmanageable reality I had imagined it might be.

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