Saying goodbye to "How I Met Your Mother"

There’s a little pain in my heart when I watch How I Met Your Mother wrap up the last season. Partly because I’ve been watching this show for a really long time and that it’s so much a part of my formative adult years. (I started watching when I was 18 and I am now officially in late twenties.) But also because I feel a little jealous that Ted has a happy ending for certain.

You watch him trudge through the ninth season, going through the motions of his pain with Robin and Barney getting married and being the fifth wheel and remaining the only unmarried friend in the gang. But you roll with it because in one episode there is a flashback from a future many years from today showing you a beaming Cristin Milliotti, being everything Teddy Boy dreamed the “mother” to be.

She’s a bassist like Ted imagined, she’s spunky, she’s pretty but she’s more than her beauty, she’s funny, her life is storied, and she fits perfectly in the gang. I know I’m supposed to know that it’s just a show that Bays and Thomas put together – but still. When you think about all the shit that Ted had to go through, you are relieved that there is that light at the end of the tunnel, the silver lining in the dark rain cloud – that despite all those shitty years of trying to find love and never getting lucky, Ted’s story has a happy ending for certain.
 
And my wish at this point was that my life was secretly written by Bays and Thomas. That at the end of all the shitty years of trying to look for love and failing to find it, there’s a fucking prize at the end. That like Ted, all the heartache is worth it because that person with the yellow umbrella makes up for everything.

Here’s to hope. And here’s to Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. Thank you for Ted and for the hope of that person with the yellow umbrella. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready to say goodbye to Ted Mosby