How I Met Your Father – Season Finale, Episode 14: The Happy Ending

The kiss had officially declared what we were feeling for each other. And although we were at first unsure of the future, and the next-day felt so hard because we had to say goodbye on Monday, it was a beginning of all things wonderful in our life.

Eddie was the happiest of all when I told him about what happened. He was amazed and slightly bemused because he didn’t believe that two people eventually met and got together for real over internet – I couldn’t be more thankful to him than I already was.

Our story was even published on Yahoo – about true love found on their Meetic.

It all happened so fast…

After that first visit, came more visits, and more trips for me back to Paris. It was a long-distance relationship, and as we celebrated our two months being together, J already asked to come with me to Jakarta, to visit and meet my family. He had already asked me to meet his too, at Christmas.

And on his 22nd birthday in November, that we celebrated together in Bonn at the Tacos, a hip Mexican bar in the Zentrum, he told me he wanted to move to Germany to be near to me.

“You can’t possibly want to leave everything behind in Paris?” I asked, half-hoping that he was serious.

“I do. I really do. I want to start over new with you.”

(We would have the similar conversation twice – once before Germany and once before Indonesia)

“You don’t speak German,” I said. Now that was a real obstacle.

“I’ll learn, I promise.”

He really did. In fact, less than six months after we met, he moved to Germany.

A week after arriving in Germany, we went to Indonesia, the first time ever J had stepped outside Europe – and in a country so far away he never dreamed once before that he would go.

He loved Indonesia the very moment he arrived in this country. I brought him as my Plus One at my cousin’s wedding – I finally somehow managed to do so.

He also fell in love so much with life in Indonesia that, on our way back to Germany, in the airport, he told me we should never leave, that we should just live there. It didn’t happen that year, but the year after, and we have been living and working here since.

It’s love

It’s strange how love could make you do things you never thought you would. Like switching all your life to match your significant one’s life.

J had switched his life, turned it upside down so that he could be with me. Because he loved me. And I loved him so much for that, too (aside his sense of humor, his smile, his small habits and a gazillion more things in his persona). It isn’t easy changing job and country, let alone changing everything in your life altogether at the same time.

J always thought that he’d spend the rest of his life working and living in Paris, marry a girl there and pay mortgages for a flat in the nice Parisian banlieue.

Instead, we took our chance, moved to Germany and then to Indonesia. He married me, someone completely stranger, that just happened to cross his path one fine Sunday, the 1st of August 2004.

We were married 18 months after we met.

I always thought I would not get married until much much later – at 32 maybe? Or even 35. Instead I was married before I was 24.

Of course we had taken a wild, crazy bet by getting married that early and things could have not worked between us. Fortunately after the newlyweds’ dramaful adjustment phase, we just bonded closer and closer.

Today, we have been married for six years, six full years of love, commitment, trust, honesty and faith, but also six full years of understanding, adjusting, adapting, compromises. As we grow older and wiser together, our priorities changed and our goals in life, too.

Louis, you were born seven years after we met, five years after we were married, and you are the most important milestone we have reached together so far.

And I’m looking forward to more, much much more years to come, more milestones. Because the efforts of being married doesn’t stop the day you say “I do” – it is in your everyday, your whole life. It takes so much things to make a marriage work and we are still, always, making everything work.

Now you know, Louis, how I met your father. One day, on your wedding day, I hope we will be there to tell these stories. And one day, you will be able to pass on these wonderful memories to your own children.

This was how I met your father.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 6: The Parisian Guy

“So who’s this AsHeardOnRadio guy?”

I must be so obviously not myself – Mathilda, the six-foot tall Kenyan girl in my class, one of the good friends I had in university, inquired with interest because I seemed unusually so very unlike me (Months later, she’d told me that I looked strangely happy – could I have been living the Savage Garden Song “I knew I loved you before I met you” moment? She also said I didn’t talk about anything else but AsHeardOnRadio).

Eddie was away at his mother’s in Düsseldorf and Laurie was in London for the summer so I hadn’t had the chance to tell them yet. Mathilda and I met for coffee in downtown Cologne, at Monday afternoon following my first encounter with AsHeardOnRadio, whose real name was J.

“Well, he lives in Paris and he works in web industry.”

And he has a blog! I added to myself. Mathilda wasn’t very internet as a person so she wouldn’t understand the importance about having a blog as much as I wasn’t a tresses person (I obviously didn’t understand why she’d spend 8 hours every Sunday to redo her African tresses).

But yes, AsHeardOnRadio, that I fondly called “The Parisian Guy”, lived in the 18th Arondissement in Paris in his own flat with a roommate called Rudy. Gosh, looking back, I feel like a stalker. But his blog had pretty much the information I needed. A little bit TMI, actually. He talked a lot about his life, his job, his family and way before I met the people in his stories in real life, I already knew all about them.

He was the fourth of five children, from the Jurassian St.-Claude, south-east of France. His dad had a ranch with milk cows and his mother worked in a psychiatric hospital, he had a sister living in London and a brother living in Strasburg, another brother living in Gex, in the French-Swiss borders and the little brother who was still in high school. Himself had lived since 2000 in Paris.

His blog address proudly bore his own surname (That would be your surname, Louis, one day, but one story at a time, okay?). That kinda impressed me. Back then, I knew people could buy domains, but owning your own family name as a domain, oh wow, how cool could that be? Beyond. (Everyone was also saying that in 2004: “How cool could that be?” “Beyond!!!”)

He works as a web mobile developer for a company called Index Europe. So the blog was a part of his own personal résumé website. I was so bad at programming at school that I was also über-impressed by the small script he put on his website, a script called Mosaïc which went like this: you have a blank box, on which you have to click and then small boxes in gray would appear in tiles, big and small, then the small gray boxes went around their canvas before disappearing, over and over again. Wow. I. Was. Impressed. (Years from that day, we do the more advanced version of this small animation in each and every web product we deliver to our clients – I guess Mosaïc was the primitive version of JQuery?)

The blog, of course, also has his photograph. In black and white sepia. He looked serious, bold, but there was some fun sparkling in his eyes and most importantly, he was handsome. He had green eyes (That you will inherit, Louis), with deep dimples etched in his cheeks when he smiled (The dimples you will inherit too), dark hair and most important of all, he was funny.

After he said hello, we kinda talked for like, five hours straight and then he called me. I liked his voice with a strong French accent (At that time, Louis, I no longer spoke French so your father made an effort to talk in English).

I was asking myself, “What is this? Why would I be talking to a stranger I don’t even know for real? Am I getting desperate? That desperate so I’d talk to just anyone?” But he was so entertaining I couldn’t stop talking to him.

At that time, Yahoo! was booming. (So sad that it’s declining today) And Yahoo! Messenger was fun! Such a great instant chat messenger. I no longer use Yahoo! Products except Flickr – kinda miss those days. And by then, we could have a main Yahoo nickname that serves as our email address, but in addition to this main nickname, we could have endless multiple nicknames.

AsHeardOnRadio’s main email nickname was Mainate. It meant Black Myna Bird in English.

Strange thing was, we were strangers, right? But we talked for hours and as we talked and talked, everything felt so familiar. Like we knew each other for real, and for years. People say, that’s how you know you find your soulmate. For me, it was because he was interesting.

Do you know where Indonesia is, Mister?

“Where are you from?” AsHeardOnRadio asked me.

“Indonesia. Do you have any idea where it is?” I responded. I was sure he didn’t know where it was.

“Of course I do,” he knew where it was even if he had not a single clue how the country could be like. I was the first Indonesian AsHeardOnRadio had ever met in his entire life. (There were a lot of Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese in Paris, but Indonesian? He had never met one before)

Of course, at that time, he had no idea he would end up marrying this very Indonesian and so far has spent 20% of his life in the country, where his son was born, too.

The Parisian Guy. That I ended up marrying and became the father of my baby son. Funny how life goes around making things fall into places, eh?

I would spend my whole first week of August, right before I flew to Ibiza with Ed, talking on Yahoo! Messenger with AsHeardOnRadio.

And by the time I had to fly to Ibiza, he had me under his spell.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 5: As Heard On Radio

Okay, I was just 21. Just turned over the legal age to drink. And most importantly I was young.

So excuse me if I listened to music like this:

It was my summer anthem of 2004 (the one that is less suicidal actually. I also listened to several bunch of other depressing songs, like Hoobastank’s The Reason, Air’s Cherry Blossom Girl, Rosenstolz’s Liebe ist Alles, The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Evanescence’s Bring Me To Life).

I listened to that (okay, super cheesy and J later on had me sworn not to listen to such shitty hip hop songs anymore) song all summerlong.

Summer 2004

In 2003, summer was the hottest summer for the last 50 years in Europe, which started at the end of March and ended in early November – and 2004 had spring chased off by summer heat just a wee bit later – in April we were already donning tongs / flip flops and summery outfits, sitting down on the banks of River Rhine, listening to the sounds of water.

Then, the breezes swayed me over to die Insel Sylt – the tiny Sylt Island north of Germany, which lies off the shores between Denmark and Germany in the Nordsee. And to the Islas Baleares in Espana, the sunny Ibiza. But more on that later.

I love summer in Europe. The nights are just getting longer and longer to peak on summer solstice on the 21st of June.

I love the smell of grass in the parks, wet at dawn and slowly getting dry as the sun rises. I love the festivals – outdoor showcases and experiences of music, dancing, laughter, smiles. I love the summer holidays to the islands of Europe, cruising on an open-top speedboat with a glass of chilly drink in my hand. I love sunglasses – we wear them even at night in summer. I love Cologne in all its summer splendor – the splendid basilica towering above the Zentrum with its tribe of white doves flying alongside the roofs up above.

God, I miss Europe. Always. Bonn and Cologne will always be two of my nearest-at-heart homes around the world.

In summer 2004, my cousin sent me an invitation to her wedding back home, which would take place about eight months later in February 2005. She said, “Bring your plus one.”

It was my first wedding invitation after I moved to Europe. It was a white of an aurora borealis-white with frilly green ribbons tied around it. It was pretty. I wondered if I could bring a PLUS ONE to her wedding.

Sunday, 1 August 2004, 3 PM

I still remember that day. It was a Sunday, the 1st of August 2004. I left my window open all day long, the strong, fragrantly sweet smell of violet-colored wisteria was invading my room, sending sentimental emotions to my mind.

I played around with the wedding invitation.

My cousin. Getting married. She was five years older than me. I knew she met her husband while they were children. They had been together forever. On the very first day at kindergarten, her soon-to-be husband saw her and told his sister, “This is the girl I’m going to marry one day.”

How romantic. I wondered if such book-romantic stories only happened to other people. Not to me.

I left my Yahoo! Messenger open and sighed.

And as I was looking on the screen of my desktop computer idly, my mind was there and everywhere, a message popped up: “asheardonradio would like to talk to you”.

And unlike Ted’s children, who are still clueless who their mother is, even until now in the seventh season of How I Met Your Mother, you know, Louis, that asheardonradio on Yahoo! Messenger, is your father. Even though, back then, we had no clue about you. Not yet.

How I Met Your Father – Episode 3: Eddie the Matchmaker

Apart from diamonds, gay men are the best friends a girl can ever have.

They have everything men have – but they understand girls so well like a straight guy would never do.

I met Eddie at one of the classes and we became great friends. He was from Brazil, originally, but his parents moved to Germany to work, decades ago, before they split up amicably when Eddie was 13 and each got remarried. So he has two sets of recomposed families who have great relationship with each other.

Eddie was gay. Obviously he was. He was the lean-and-tall type, and people said he looked like a brown-haired Ricky Martin. Which wasn’t exactly true but he liked it so much I never bothered to tell him otherwise.

There were a lot of South Americans living in Germany (as you knew from my last experience with TB…) but the Brazilians were the tallest and best-looking ones. Eddie was a head-turner. But he had a steady boyfriend already for years and they were living together for several years already. His name was Ralf. Businessman. They lived downtown Cologne at an area called Friesenplatz, and several doors away from their apartment was the All Bar One. We loved the bar. We used to spend long summer nights drinking their famous caipirinha there.

Eddie and the Bet

So, Eddie, being  a true drama queen he was, was all worried that I’d end up like one of the old maidens at the FH. There were a lot of unmarried girls at the FH past their 30s (and yes, a lot of university students in Germany are over 30 – unlike in the US or in Asia, a lot of people go to work first and save up before getting a degree), but I didn’t think they was wrong – I considered that they were unmarried because they hadn’t found their One yet – or simply didn’t want to – I thought there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. But Eddie thought there was. He said that even the gays could lead a steady relationship, so a girl just turned 21 definitely could. Should. Have to. Must.

I told him I was done meeting people haphazardly. Look at what happened with the previously failed flings. I didn’t really want to get involved with anyone if it was going to end badly. Well, I didn’t get hurt that much by the flings because none of them were that serious, but I had previously been involved with a couple of badly-ended relationships and I hated the pain of: being cheated on, being made to feel idiotic, being made to feel inferior, being made to cry, being made paranoid – all that I would really like to dismiss. I had enough stress with the FH already.

Eddie always said, “C’est la vie!” Well yes but I could really do with a nice guy and I preferably would only get to know a nice guy; and where the heck could we find one? Definitely not at the FH after all the flingsy catastrophes!

For some time, Eddie kept pushing and pushing me to meet someone. He said that the greatest joy of a South American mother was to see their children all married off. Eddie was not my mother and I was definitely not looking to get married. Perhaps just looking for some fun. It shouldn’t hurt.

Girls around me were not of any comparisons, though. There was no pressure in our peers. Single or not single, that was not a question. The only question that mattered was about feeling comfortable with your life. And I honestly felt comfortable being single.

My other best friends were single, too. There were Angie and Laurie and Mandy. Angie was not exactly single, she was entangled in a long-distance relationship actually but it was such a long distance one I practically considered she was single. De facto single. And Laurie was having some sort of strange, complicated relationship with one of her exes in highschool who followed her to Germany. Mandy was single too, never even having any close encounter with the opposite sex all her life and definitely uninterested – she was totally concentrating on her studies, not wanting to be in any relationship whatsoever.

In the family, out of my four female adult cousins scattered in Germany, only one was single – Nattie. The others were in relationships. There was Jas, who was in a steady, solid relationship with her boyfriend (they got married last year in 2011), and the rare few times I visited her, I actually liked to see them together, and secretly longed to live something special like they had, one day. Diana got several boyfriends – she was a very popular girl who had a lot of suitors. Elisa had a rocky relationship with a guy called Si, I was her shoulder to cry on. When I remembered how Si was behaving so nasty toward her, I really didn’t want to be in a relationship with an abusive guy like that one. Elisa was too good for him. But she was in love.

So my usual responses toward Eddie’s usual sermons about meeting someone, falling in love and yadda yadda yadda were hopeless. I just said that it wasn’t the right time, so no would work better than yes. N. O. No.

Anyway, Eddie wouldn’t take no for an answer. Each and every time he’d tell me I should go out, I would say not yet and then he would keep pursuing the argument discussion for at least an hour, before I finally conceded to say, “OK, I will find this Mr. Right, and I want to find him.”

The truth is Eddie couldn’t help with the noble quest of finding Mr. Right he bequeathed upon me, either – all his friends were gay so obviously out of the list. Whenever we’d go out for coffee together, there went my chance to meet straight singles. His friends were mostly good-looking but they wouldn’t find me interesting unless my name was Adam and only if I happened to have an Apple in the middle of my throat. Well, I was out of their list, too, but they were nice people to hang out with. So, on the surface, it looked as if I never took Eddie for granted.

But, when you have been indoctrinated for so long, the ideas slowly seeped into the back of your head, waiting for a trigger to complete the inception. Thanks to Eddie, I started wishing, secretly, unconsciously, that Mr. Right would eventually stride along to find me on his white horse, after having just popped out of thin air before my eyes and he’d just know what to do and he’d hold my hand for the rest of my life. I didn’t need him to be all that perfect like in the movies and fairytales, I just needed him to be true.

I started wanting to fall in love. I started wishing that I would meet someone. I wanted to know what love was.

And one night toward the end of springtime, Destiny put a card on the table and said, “Now, Ms. C, you’re scheduled to meet someone.” Even though she didn’t tell me how strange the circumstance would be.

After what was probably too much of caipi washed away in a couple of hours, we sat down on his computer and found the Yahoo! Dating site ad embedded on one of the Yahoo! Pages we were browsing on.

“God, this site is created especially for YOU!” Eddie was suddenly struck by a lightning and before I knew it, he was registering me into the dating site. It was free for girls – paid membership for guys. He also created my profile in German. I told him I’ll write it in English and French because I secretly wanted to meet someone abroad, someone who would sway me away from boring life in Bonn.

I didn’t believe in love found over internet – I definitely didn’t. So I told him I’d try it but I couldn’t promise him anything.

So there I was, laughing with Eddie, one evening in his apartment, conscious but unconscious, half torn between the idea of meeting someone, but bewildered by the fact that internet could – and would be the matchmaker. Well, Eddie and the internet. I finished up and then clicked the “SUBMIT MY PROFILE” button, halfheartedly, unsure of what I was doing.

We all heard of the bizarre case of Armin Meiwes. The German Cannibal met his victim online. So I was kinda terrified that the only people I’d meet on internet would be wackos. Eddie assured me I was overreacting. I was posting on a Yahoo! Website, not a strange blacklisted gory website.

To ensure me, as well as to make his own joke, also, goes without saying, as a test to prove his ever-radiating charms, Eddie also made a profile for himself. He told me blatantly that he’d get more hits than I would because he wasn’t afraid like I was – but that he didn’t have my Asian charms and that could be getting me more hits, finally. We agreed that whoever got the less number of hits would pay the other with better number of hits a trip to Ibiza. We were going, anyway. That was the plan for the coming summer. (My female best friends all had other plans and Ralf would be away on a business trip to the States for three weeks)

At that time, Yahoo! was the most popular thing going on the net. It had been for years. I always had my Yahoo! Messenger on whenever I could, with that nickname: girlfrommarss (Okay, two s’es because the one with just one s at the end was clearly unavailable). (Girl from Mars? From the most boring town in Germany called Bonn, more likely)

I think I wasn’t sure what was to be expected. What kind of outcome I should be waiting for. The truth is, I wouldn’t have met your father, Louis, if it wasn’t for Eddie.

Years after, I still remembered that evening when we decided to roll the snowball of fate down the hill, and even though we lost contact when your father and I moved back to France, I would always be grateful for my old gay friend who steered me toward the website formerly called Yahoo! Dating.

If it wasn’t for Eddie, you wouldn’t be here today, Louis. And I thank all Heavens I listened to him. He was right. Love does happen over internet – in the most unimaginable ways.