Unconventional Love A Story of Adaptation and Connection

Like if someone would have told me 20 years ago that my spouse would be three foot two, I'd be like, yeah, right

You wanted 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

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, 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 him to sit by pushing on their back and he trained to resist a push downward and to help somebody simply 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, quarantine together, you probably like each other

A little bit. 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