Unconventional Love, A Story of Adaptation and Connection

Like if someone would have told me 20 years ago that my spouse would be 3'2", I'd be like, yeah, right

You want it tall, dark, and handsome? Yep. She got this. So we met, we teach at the same school

I teach art and Seneca teaches math. One day they were bringing in new teachers and I was in the faculty room and this little person came in in a wheelchair

and I honestly went and hid because I had never seen a little person before

I have a form of dwarfism called diastrophic dysplasia. I'm the only one in my family that has it and it's a recessive gene

So it's actually quite common. So both parents had to have the gene in order for me to inherit both genes

Terminology, I mean a lot of little people just use the term little people like they're a little person or I'll say I have dwarfism or I'm a little person

I'm just either one of those. You'll notice that we have two microwaves so that Seneca can reach one because she can't reach the one that was built into the kitchen

So she has her own. Then I have sticks everywhere in my house where I can use it to turn on and off the water

I have a service dog. His name is Murphy and he's what we call a heavy mobility service dog because he does racing

Most dogs you train them to sit by pushing on their back and he's trained to resist a push downward and to help somebody support themselves

He takes off my socks. He can open the door for me. Being teachers, I think it brings us closer quite a bit

I mean, she's the best part of my day. I know that if I'm having a bad day, I just have to wait till lunchtime and I can have lunch with her

I think we've been able to make some really cool connections with kids and I think it's becoming more like acceptable nowadays than it used to be

And I think a lot of the kids that, you know, are LGBT, they feel comfortable because they know, okay, you know, my teachers are in that group

My teachers would be supportive of me. I was new to the area and so Christy was great to invite me to go places and so I would just see her out and about

We also ended up living at the same apartment complex. And then when COVID hit, she moved in with me to quarantine and she never left

We always say COVID brought us together. And if you can survive a couple months, you know, a couple months into dating, spending a year quarantined together, you probably like each other

Our wedding was really simple. Like we just wanted to keep it simple and just have family and just close

We had maybe 30 people there. It was just a dinner at the barn after we got married and just simple

Like we're simple people