This special How I Met Your Mother episode is all about the Mother and how she met Ted. It begins in September of 2005 with a girl ending up in the wrong MacLaren's pub on her way to the 21st birthday party for the mother. The girl we later learn is her roommate Kelly. While waiting for her boyfriend Max who is running late, the mother gets a call and learns he has died. Returning home from his funeral she finally opens the gift he had gotten her which was a ukulele.

Next in April of 2008 Kelly says enough already and makes the mother go out with her on St. Patrick's day. At the bar she runs into her instructor from orchestra camp and leaves with him to donate her cello to his school. Things get awkward between the two before she realizes she left her umbrella at the bar and goes to retrieve it. When she gets there she learns someone had taken it. We see Ted walking with it in the rain.

In 2009 while pursuing her dream of ending poverty, the mother meets Cindy in Econ 301. She invites Cindy to move in with her and says she has given up on love. Then Professor Mosby walks in only to eventually realize he is in the wrong class.

January 2010 Cindy breaks up with Ted when he seems obsessed with only the things in her apartment belonging to the mother. The mother walks out of her room and finds her yellow umbrella. She learns it belonged to that same professor from her economics class. Cindy tells her she and Ted broke up on account of her and then kisses the mother.

Later that year she meets Darren and while lugging her amp out of a club she is helped by Louis who she ends up dating for a couple years before realizing she wasn't in love with him. Her band then gets the job playing at Barney and robin's wedding so she stays at Louis's beach house nearby. On the night Ted punches Darren, she returns home to find Louis there who proposes. After asking Max for permission to let go, she turns down Louis's proposal.

She lucks out and gets a room at the Farhampton Inn, which is next to Ted's room. She plays the ukulele outside her room and Ted listens from the patio next door. Ted goes in to tell Barney about the singing only to find him gone.