Ojai Valley News 

Wednesday, April 12, 2000

PEGGY O'NEILL TALKS with Mira Monte 

By Bonnie MacNeill 

VN staff reporter

Principal Larry Hartmann and his staff about the program she will present to school students

A new gal in town might be short on stature, but the message she wants to impart to school kids is long on esteem - if you have the diamond of self-esteem inside, you are always walking tall.

Peggy O'Neill, and her husband Brad Laise, moved to Ojai last fall because Laise could no longer live comfortably in the thin air of Boulder, Colo. He needed a sea level community and is now an aspiring actor in Los Angeles.

O'Neill had already started taking her message to students around the country and this year has offered it to local schools. She spoke recently to school administrators and was immediately booked to talk with students in two local elementary schools, with more work offered for the future.

The 3-foot-8-inch woman is a psychologist who tells students the importance of kindness and the impacts of cruelty from her own experiences and from their perspective.

"Students need to walk tall," she said. "They need to know that we are all different and we are also all the same. We have the things we all have in common, our bodies and spirits, yet we all have a unique gift inside." It's discovering that "unique gift" that took O'Neill much of her 40-something life to find. She said she hopes to make the journey to inner worth an easier ones for the students she talks with about it. O'Neill was born of average-sized parents. She explained that there are two types of short-statured people, midgets and dwarfs.  "A midget is born with all the traits of their parents, but then stops growing. Their limb proportions are right for their bodies, everything is the same size, just shorter.

"A dwarf's genetic information says the bone structure is different," said O'Neill. Her limbs are short in proportion to her body. Her head is of a normal size for an adult. Her fingers are too short to play a piano or type on a keyboard using the 10-finger method most people are taught in school. "In the 'Wizard of Oz,' the little people were mostly midgets. There are no more people in that situation because they can be treated with hormones," said O'Neill. There is no hormone treatment for dwarfs. "My oldest brother is also a little person. They (her parents) didn't know anything about it until he was 2 years old. Because of what they had learned, when I was born they were not sure, but they were sure by the time I was 6 months old. I have two normal sized sisters," said O'Neill. She said her dwarfism meant that, in addition to all the normal challenges of a child growing up, she had some additional problems. When she was 2 years old, she had the size and proportion of children her age. By second grade, at age 7, she was a head shorter than her classmates. "Between 8 and 16, 1 grew to the height I am now. I did go through a growth process, but it was slower and slower. My bones got wider and my dwarfism was more noticeable as I matured. At 11, you could see that my fingers were shorter," she said.

She said 80 percent of dwarfs have acondroplasia, longer trunks and shorter limbs, but more regular proportions.

"Of 100 little people, one would have my type, acromesomelia. She said that type was more visible in its proportional differences, especially of the limbs and fingers.

"I learned early that when adults are not around, kids take advantage of their social advantage. Kids say they are better or bigger than you. I felt sad during my childhood, sad and mad and angry. "But, I'm like a born-again person. There was a definite period when my inner life was dismal and dark. With the face I wore, people wouldn't notice there was a problem, but I failed in relationships and had a negative self-image."

When O'Neill was in college she learned to meditate and found inner strength and resources she didn't know she had. "I went to Diamond Heart School and discovered that inside of myself was a big diamond, bigger than my body, that was representative of my inner presence," said O'Neill. The positive self-esteem she learned to find within herself became a turning point in her life. She was in her mid-30s at the time, she said.

"I came to terms with the fact that the essential 'me' was the presence of a diamond," she said. "My beliefs and behavior changed." She became a psychologist and motivational speaker doing diversity training and life coaching.

"I've been speaking for approximately three years, traveling all over the country, speaking at schools and also in corporations," said O'Neill. Her 45-minute school lecture helps children identify her differences and appreciate them rather than fear or shun them. "When I meet kids on the street or in a store, they usually ask questions. They see my car keys and are astonished I can drive. They ask if I'm a mother. They aren't exactly asking that. What they are asking is 'Am I an adult?"' said O'Neill. She said she answers the gamut of questions and hopes her frankness will help children see that even with the visual uniqueness she lives, there is reason to rejoice, reason for them to rejoice in their own uniqueness and reason not to make fun of people's differences.

She has two books nearing distribution. A children's book, "The Girl with the Square Head," is geared to 3- to 8-year-olds. Its heroine is a girl other kids call names. She is led to look into the water and find the diamond in her heart. She is offered the gifts of courage, confidence and compassion. That book should be out in the fall, O'Neill said.

This spring, an adult book, "Walking Tall: Overcoming Inner Smallness No Matter What Size You Are," will be released. "It should help people overcome their fear of being successful, no matter what the situation," she said.

In addition to their work, the O'Neill-Laise couple is working on their home and enjoying Ojai life.

"My dream is to build a house with a false floor one step up from the normal floor. We'd put drawers under our floor so that if we sold it, a normal-sized family could remove our floor," she said. For now, the couple is living in a normal-sized house and using stools to reach cupboards. "I can barely reach doorknobs," she said with a good natured giggle.