Cole and Sav

by Cole

  For me, the whole social media thing started as a way of sharing pictures of my baby with friends. Both Michelle and I were young moms, and our girls, Ava and Ev, were almost the exact same age. When they were around eight months old, Michelle and I started dressing them in cute, matching outfits and posting pictures of them on an Instagram page we made just for them. We never expected the page to blow up, but it grew enough that we started getting free clothes for our girls to wear in the pictures. In the Instagram world, if you upload nice, clean pictures and if you have a good amount of followers, stores and others will send you outfits to wear in your pictures. It’s basically free advertising for them, but I was happy to do it because baby clothes are expensive, and at the time I was a nineteen-year-old single mom and college student.

  The page might have stayed that way, just a way to get some cute clothes from local stores and show off pictures to our friends, if not for BuzzFeed. One day BuzzFeed featured the Everleigh and Ava page on their website, and our Instagram page went crazy! The girls’ page gained two hundred thousand new followers in just a couple of days and didn’t stop growing until they had more than a million followers. Soon after, Everleigh, who by this time was two and a half years old, started modeling for Kardashian Kids and some other big brands.

  When Everleigh and Ava’s Instagram page took off, so did mine. Michelle and I posted pictures of ourselves doing mommy stuff with our girls. With the success of my own page, I discovered a world I didn’t know existed, the business side of social media. I’d done social media forever through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, just like everyone my age. However, I learned there is a big difference between posting pictures for friends and having it turn into a way to make some extra money.

  Right around that time I posted my first video with Ev on an app called musical.ly. We did a fun lip-synch to a Justin Bieber song. Ev was a natural at it, and her cute, three-year-old personality just lit up the screen. I mean, come on, who can resist a three-year-old dancing and singing to Justin Bieber? Just for fun, we did a few more videos, and I posted them but didn’t check back on the app for at least a week. When I logged back on, I found we had fifty thousand followers. Someone connected to musical.ly must have noticed because they featured one of our videos on the app itself, which introduced our videos to a ton of people who, otherwise, might never have found us. I thought, Well, that’s cool, and didn’t think much more about it. That shows how little I knew about social media. Before I knew it, our followers numbered in the millions. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not like we did anything special to try to gain a bunch of followers. It just happened.

  The more our musical.ly page grew, the more our Instagram pages blew up. We started getting some actual cash from the two, which was great. Between being a mom and going to college full-time, I did not have a lot of time left over for a real job. Social media provided a way for me to make money without taking time away from what was most important to me. It also led to Cole sending me the direct message that I had answered, but he never saw my reply. Him sending that direct message led to our random meeting at The Grove, when he just happened to be in California and just happened to be at The Grove the same time as Ev and me, and he just happened to see me and notice that I’d seen him. Then my sister just happened to run into him a short time later and asked him to go find me and say hi. I still can’t tell you why I asked her to do that, except something inside me just made me blurt it out. Now I know that something was God. This random meeting wasn’t random to Him.

  When I got home after meeting Cole at The Grove, I started checking out his social media feeds. I knew he made videos on musical.ly, but until that night I’d never watched his earlier Vine videos. Vine was a really popular video platform, but it went under about a year before I met Cole. Watching his videos there made me fall over laughing. He was hilarious! I loved his sense of humor and creativity. I also discovered he had been on The Amazing Race with his mom. How many guys his age would do an around-the-world race with their mothers? He didn’t seem like any other guy I’d met.

  Before I went to bed, I went on his Snapchat feed where I found a video he had just posted about meeting me and Everleigh. He went on and on about how cute Everleigh and Ava were and what great kids they were. Hearing that helped me relax. He seemed like a good guy. I could see myself going to VidCon with him. I texted Michelle, who had their numbers, and asked her to text the numbers to me so we could arrange our meet-up on Friday. I sort of wanted to see him again before I totally committed to spending a couple of days with him and his friend, but I wasn’t sure how to make that happen. I wasn’t looking for a new boyfriend even though I constantly asked God to someday bring that perfect guy into my life. I was simply praying and trusting that someday He might answer my prayers.

  3

  A Girl with a Past

  Savannah

  To be honest, when I first met Cole at The Grove, I didn’t see him as anything more than a possible friend who might make VidCon less awkward to attend. I was a twenty-three-year-old single mom living in Southern California. He was a nineteen-year-old kid visiting Los Angeles from Alabama. I certainly didn’t have any kind of romantic thoughts about him. Don’t get me wrong. I thought he was really cute but more in an “Awww, he’s so cute” kind of way, not in a potential boyfriend kind of way. I already had an on-again, off-again boyfriend in Ev’s dad, who at the time was more off-again than on-again.

  I never had much luck with guys before I met Cole. My family moved from San Jose to SoCal right before my freshman year. I started high school and didn’t know anyone. Then I met a guy who seemed to be terrific. We even met at church! We dated all through high school, and I thought we had a future together—until I found out that he was cheating on me. I really loved him and had given him the one thing I could never get back: my virginity. When he cheated on me, my world came crashing down. The news hit me extra hard because a few years earlier my dad had cheated on my mom, basically ending their twenty-seven-year marriage. My parents splitting up completely blindsided me.

  When I was a little girl, my dad was absolutely the best dad any girl could ever hope for. I was such a daddy’s girl. Though I loved both of my parents very much, he was my favorite. My mom knew it, but she seemed okay with it. The two of them had a really amazing relationship. He and I did too. Every morning before he took me to school, he went to Starbucks and bought hot chocolate for my sister and me. He also always made sure the car was nice and warm inside before we got in for the early drive to school. After school my sister and I had dance classes every day. My dad sold insurance, so he bought the building next door to the dance studio and had his office there. He did it so he could be close to us and drop over and watch us dance every day. That meant so much to me. He was really good about doing little things like that. He also made big gestures as well. I remember him taking my sister and me shopping. Once, we went to the mall, and he handed each of us a one-hundred-dollar bill to shop with. He wasn’t trying to buy our love. I think he wanted us to learn how to handle money. Whatever his reason, I never forgot that day. We had such a great time together.

  Things started to change when I was in middle school, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. We moved from San Jose down to Dana Point in Orange County, California. We moved, but not all of us, at least not all of the time. My dad lived in San Jose during the week and came down and stayed with us every other weekend. My mom told me that he had to stay up there for work. I didn’t have any reason not to believe her. Maybe if I’d paid a little closer attention, I might have had some doubts. Before we moved, my parents had been fighting a little more than normal. I didn’t read too much into it since they’d been married so long. After we moved and my dad came down to stay with us on weekends, I usually found him sleeping on the couch instead of with my mom. Again, this should have been a huge red flag to me, but I knew my dad liked to stay up late watching television. I figured he’d fallen asleep there and didn’t wake up until mornin
g.

  Eventually my dad’s every-other-weekend visits turned into once-a-month visits, then once every couple of months until he hardly came to see us at all. I just assumed he was going through a busy season at work. But then one day, the doorbell rang. My mom opened the door, and a neighbor we didn’t know very well was standing there. She told my mom someone had called her house with a message for my mom. Then she said that the woman on the phone told her to tell my mom that she was so sorry. As soon as the neighbor said that, my mom burst out crying. The neighbor apologized and left. After closing the door, my mom backed up a little and collapsed onto the stairs. I sat down next to her and put my arm around her. I tried to comfort her, but I was confused. Why would some woman calling a neighbor to say she was sorry make my mom fall apart? It didn’t make any sense to me. Even though I didn’t know what was going on, I told my mom all those things you say to people when you want them to feel better. “It’s okay, Mom. Everything is going to be all right,” I said.

  “You don’t understand, Savannah,” she said. She tried to say something else, but she couldn’t hold herself together long enough to get the words out. Instead, she buried her face in my arms and cried her eyes out. Finally she sat up and gathered herself enough to say, “The woman who called our neighbor is not just any woman. She’s the woman your dad’s been having an affair with over the past couple of years.”

  Before that afternoon, I had thought I had a great Christian family. When we lived together, we went to church together nearly every Sunday. My dad had seemed like such a godly man. He was best friends with our pastor. Now all of that—my whole childhood, really—felt like a lie.

  However, my parents splitting up didn’t immediately devastate me. I was more confused than angry. My dad and I had always been so close that it was hard for me to think that he was some kind of bad guy. Our relationship changed, however. We didn’t see each other very often, but I was so busy with high school and friends and everything else that I didn’t think too much about it. And I’d met this “great guy”—someone I really loved and had given myself to.

  So when I found out this great guy was cheating on me, I felt doubly betrayed. I think that’s when I really felt the pain of my parents’ divorce. Soon after, I met a guy named Tommy through some of my high school friends.

  He became my rebound boyfriend.

  Tommy was really the wrong guy at the wrong time. After my Christian boyfriend cheated on me, I started to give up on guys . . . and God. As I wrote before, having him cheat on me made me see my parents’ divorce in a whole new light. I better understood how hurt my mom was, and I could not understand how my dad could do that to her. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my father, and our relationship is better today than it has been in a long time. I’m just telling you how I felt when I met Tommy. My dad had always been a godly man in my eyes, and I had this Christian boyfriend, and yet both of them hurt and disappointed me. That made me think, Why bother? What’s the point? While I wasn’t a perfect angel in high school, I was definitely a good kid compared to a lot of my friends. Even after my parents split, I kept going to church, maybe not as regularly as before, but I still went. I considered myself a Christian because I’d had a conversion experience when I was younger. By the time I met Tommy, I hardly ever went to church anymore. I also started drinking and partying, things I had never done.

  In the beginning, Tommy seemed like the sweetest guy ever. He made me feel so special. Two months after we started dating, we slept together for the first time. I was nineteen. To be honest, the decision to have sex with him wasn’t a big deal since I’d already lost my virginity to my high school boyfriend. Pretty much the next day my super-sweet boyfriend changed completely. It was like he got what he wanted, so he stopped trying—except when he wanted more. We dated another two months after that, but things went downhill fast. We fought a lot until I’d finally had enough and broke up with him. We had just broken up when I realized I was “late,” so I bought a pregnancy test. Tommy came over, and we saw the results together.

  I was pregnant.

  The thought of having a baby scared me to death. I didn’t know how I’d continue going to college and take care of a baby. And if I didn’t finish college, what kind of life could I have? Tommy, however, seemed oddly excited about it. He even talked about us getting married. My parents never would have gone for that because they were not overly fond of Tommy. Telling my parents I was pregnant with his child was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. They were really supportive of me, however, and they loved the idea of becoming grandparents. My pregnancy caused them to start talking, to the point where my dad moved back in with us. He and my mom decided that they needed to make their marriage work so they both could be there for me and my baby. I was beyond thrilled. I was like Yay! I’m going to have my dad back in my life! He sat down with my brother and sister and me and asked all of us to forgive him and give him a second chance. Of course I was willing to do that. My fears about being pregnant went away.

  It didn’t last. Two weeks later my dad went back to the woman for whom he left my mom. I didn’t speak to him for months . . . not until after Everleigh was born. My disappointments were just beginning. Around my sixth month of pregnancy, I learned Tommy, who had been eager to get married when he found out I was pregnant, was now cheating on me. I was done, I thought. I dumped him, but we got back together when Everleigh was born. He promised me he’d changed, and I let myself believe him because I felt like I had to do everything I could to try to make a relationship with Tommy work for our daughter’s sake.

  He hadn’t changed.

  Within a matter of weeks after Everleigh was born, Tommy left me. Again. I felt horrible about myself. It wasn’t the last time. Tommy came back around whenever something big with Everleigh happened, like Christmas or a birthday. A lot of times I asked him to come back because I felt like our daughter needed her dad to be there. He came, and both of us were so focused on Everleigh that we didn’t argue, and we had what felt like happy family times. Happy family days triggered the two of us talking about getting back together. He’d swear everything was going to be different this time. “Just give me another chance,” he’d say, and I always caved. We always got along great as long as Everleigh was with us. However, whenever she was with my mom or asleep, the arguments started, the same old arguments we always had. Words flew. I was left feeling ugly and worse than worthless, like no one else would ever want to be with me because I had a kid. I could not live with that, so Tommy and I would split up—again. After every breakup, when Ev was asleep, I’d break down in tears before God, begging Him to bring me a guy who’d love and respect me and love Everleigh like his own.

  That guy never showed up. Or maybe I just never gave him a chance. I once dated a good Christian guy in college during one of the times Tommy and I had broken up. He treated me with respect and was the kind of guy I should have dated, but then Tommy came back around asking for another chance, and I gave it to him. Just like that, I broke up with the good guy to go back to the bad boy. Yes, Tommy had cheated on me, but strangely enough, that was part of the appeal. When Tommy stared at other girls, even when we were together, that gave me a challenge to make him have eyes only for me. If he’d been all about me, then there was no chase. Writing it now, this sounds sick to me, and it was. I describe it as having a disease that I had accepted as my lot in life.

  Tommy didn’t just cheat on me. He drank a lot. But then again, I drank and partied when we first started dating. Then things changed in a way that made me really uncomfortable, and I decided I couldn’t be around that, and for sure I didn’t want my baby around it. But then he’d show up and swear to me that he was done with all of that and that he’d changed and everything was going to be different. And I’d believe him, only to get hurt again. And again. And again.

  My family begged me to give up on Tommy, which only made me mad at them and more determined to change him. “You deserve better than this, Sav,” my mo
m and sister told me over and over. I told them that they didn’t understand. But they did. I was the one who didn’t want to admit the truth to myself. Living this way changed me. I wasn’t a happy person. I acted happy in the videos Everleigh and I made on musical.ly, but overall there wasn’t a lot of joy in my life. My family saw how miserable I was. My mom told me she was always praying for me to leave him and had her friends praying as well. I know she was also asking God to send a decent, godly guy into my life. I never imagined Cole might be the answer to that prayer when I sent my sister off to find him.

  When Cole walked away from that first meeting, I didn’t know I’d met the man of my dreams, but there was something about him that made me want to see him again. He was too young for me, and he lived on the other side of the country, so having any kind of relationship with him was out of the question. Still, I found I was intrigued by him even though I really didn’t know anything about him. There was just something about him that drew me. I decided to go with it and see where it might lead.

  4

  A Sign from Heaven

  Cole

  Shortly after meeting Savannah and Everleigh at The Grove, John Stephen and I headed over to the beach at Santa Monica. We’d gone to most of the beaches in Southern California in the three weeks or so we’d been in Los Angeles. It’s one of my favorite things to do. When we got to the beach at Santa Monica, we found it had all kinds of exercise equipment—like pull-up bars and rope climbs. I did a short workout with John Stephen, but he wanted to keep working out, and I really wanted to go down closer to the water, so I told him I’d meet him back there in a half hour or so.