The "How I Met Your Mother" Theory

The story of "How I Met Your Mother" is not one about a man named Ted Mosby finding the woman who will one day become the mother of his children. It is actually the story of a man kept on life-support after a horrible car accident in 2014.

Back in 2005, when the show was first starting out, Ted Mosby was just a swinging bachelor who hoped to find just the right woman to settle down with and start a family. His quest began with Robin Scherbatsky (or as she was known back in her days as a Canadian pop star, Robin Sparkles). She was working as a flight attendant when they'd met and throughout the show, they'd managed an on-again, off-again relationship that lasted for years. Besides the fact that they just weren't that compatible, Robin had had a fairly troubled past that began before she was even born.

While her mother was still in college, she went through a phase where she'd slept with as many guys as possible, from one one-night stand to another. Eventually, she fell pregnant from one of these sexual encounters and married another man to avoid the stigma of being a single mother. Robin's stepfather was abusive in every sense of the word: physically, sexually, mentally, and emotionally; he also took immense pleasure in molesting young girls, including his own stepdaughter. This quickly escalated into straight-up raping the girl from the age of ten all the way to sixteen. It was at the age of sixteen that Robin fell pregnant with her stepfather's child. She was upset not just with herself, but with her own mother for not doing anything about her situation. She decided that the only way to get out would be to get an abortion, but she was afraid her mother would find out and try to stop her, so she opted to get one in the back alley. While the abortion had been a success, it unfortunately left her unable to bear children for the rest of her life... or so she thought.

After breaking up with Ted and entering a relationship with Barney the self-proclaimed womanizer (which would eventually lead to a marriage), Robin was finally able to get pregnant again. Up until the last trimester, she'd had a relatively easy pregnancy and Barney was even looking forward to spoiling their daughter rotten. Then, around the seventh month, Robin suddenly went into labor and her health took a nosedive. Doctors did everything they could to save her and the baby, but they both died during childbirth, leaving Barney all alone. This was actually what drove Barney to briefly revert back to his womanizing ways. For the longest time, Ted could never bring himself to accept that that's what really happened to Robin; instead, he'd just tell himself that Robin and Barney simply got a divorce for reasons that were never really clear. It wasn't until Barney managed to get another woman pregnant that he finally stopped sleeping around for good and permanently became a family man.

Sometime in 2013-2014, Ted met Tracy (or as he'd like to call her, the Mother). He'd originally been infatuated with her purely because of her uncanny resemblance to Robin, but as they got to know each other a bit more, he saw her for who she truly was: a kind, maternal soul who liked to have fun and give sagely advice. He was so in love with her that, only a few months after dating, they decided to tie the knot in front of all of their friends and family. Just six months after they'd married, Ted and Tracy decided that now was the time to start a family. Only one problem: she couldn't produce her own eggs. No problem, they would just adopt an embryo or two from the fertility clinic. However, that fateful day they were driving to the clinic, they were blindsided by a drunk driver. Tracy was killed instantly, but then she'd gotten off easily compared to her husband. Paramedics were able to get him to the hospital, but they weren't able to make him conscious again. Injuries to the brain were too severe, they said, so they had to keep him on life support for the time being until they could figure out what to do.

Meanwhile, Ted had been transferred to a world of sorts, a purgatory if you will, where he had everything he'd ever wanted: two beautiful kids, a boy named Luke and a girl named Penny respectively, a nice house, and even the voice of Bob Saget. At first, he didn't understand why he'd been brought here, but then the spirits of this world told him their reason and he knew what had to be done. For what felt like nine years but was actually six years, he told the kids that would never be the whole story of how he met their would-be mother, from beginning to end. All along the way, he made sure to include details of what his friends were like, even when he wasn't there to witness them all. The spirits had specifically asked him to tell the entire story to make sure that he'd confront the lies he'd been telling himself and come to terms with the truth of his life. Finally, when it was all over, Penny spoke up to him.

"Mom's been dead for six years," she told him. "It's time..."

It was then that he saw his dear old friend Robin holding the blue French horn. She'd come not to rekindle their failed romance as he'd believed would happen someday, but to lead him to Heaven where he could finally rest easy and be with Tracy once again. Without any hesitation whatsoever, he made his way out of the house and into her arms...

Epilogue
The next morning, he was taken off life-support. Barney, Marshall, and Lily cried as they stood over his body, unable to bring themselves to even say a word to send their friend on his way. Neither of their kids could be in the room with them, for they were simply too young to understand what was happening. Barney's current wife couldn't be with them, either; she was away selling cosmetics for business. The three friends could only watch while the doctors covered Ted with a white satin blanket and wheeled him out of the room.

"This man put up one hell of a fight, didn't he?" one of the doctors asked while they wheeled the corpse through the hospital corridor.

"Yeah," another doctor answered him. "And for six years, too. Don't know why. He was already too far gone."

"Still... he'd been brain-dead for six years and yet he held on... almost as if there was somebody out there he was fighting for..."

"Well, whoever it was, they must've been pretty special."

"Yeah... don't we all need someone like that?"