I have to be honest: I never imagined that my mum carried so many stories she had never told us. But last week we discovered something that surprised all of us—a whole chapter of her youth that none of us knew existed.
The story had a name. Peter.
Growing up, I thought I knew everything about my mum’s early years. Her endless afternoons at the outdoor pool. The sports teams she joined mostly for fun. Her first job in a bakery where she learned to roll dough and deal with grumpy morning customers. But she never once mentioned Peter—someone who clearly meant far more to her than a simple teenage fling.
We only found out because she told the story one afternoon while talking to Ria. She uses the app regularly now, often choosing quiet moments to speak about her past. I think it’s easier for her to open up when she doesn't feel she’s taking anyone’s time or attention.
That day, she recorded a memory simply titled “Peter.”And in the evening, when I listened to it, I realised we had all been missing a whole piece of her life.
She talked about him like someone she once knew deeply. A boy from the class above her. Dark curls, a loud laugh, always borrowing someone’s bicycle because he never had the money to buy one. They met properly the night of her school ball, but their story didn’t stop there.
She described how, after that dance, they became almost inseparable for a while. How he would wait for her after school so they could walk home together. How they spent long summer afternoons by the river, eating cheap ice cream and talking about what they wanted to do when they were “grown-up enough to leave town.”
He showed her how to skip stones; she helped him study for his English exam.
She said they had their own little routine: meeting at the bakery on Saturday mornings before her shift ended, so he could walk her home carrying the leftover bread rolls she smuggled out for him.
Listening to her, you could tell it wasn’t about first-love drama—for her it was being seen and finding a true companion. A warm, simple closeness that shaped her in ways she never thought to mention.
She also shared how it ended. She said it happened right after the new school year started.Peter had joined a different sports group over the summer, and somehow that small change shifted everything. New friends, new jokes, new inside stories she wasn’t part of.
So one afternoon, she asked him to meet her behind the school gym - their usual spot, the place where things had always felt easy.
He hesitated, looking at the ground, kicking a bit of gravel with his shoe. And then he said the kind of clumsy sentence only a teenage boy can manage:
“I don’t know… Everyone keeps asking if we’re, like… together-together. And I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
She said she felt her stomach drop — not because he was cruel, but because he looked just as confused as she felt.
He wasn’t choosing someone else. He wasn’t ending things out of anger. He was simply overwhelmed by being sixteen and suddenly expected to define something that had always just been between them.
That was their breakup.
And looking back, she told Ria: „Peter was my first real companion. But we were too young to know what to do with a bond like that.”
None of us knew any of this. Not my brother. Not my daughter, who immediately imagined them as characters from an old movie. Not me.
We only learned it because my mum chose to record it—quietly, privately—into the app, trusting that her memories were safe there until someone wanted to listen.
What I treasure most is not the romance itself, but the glimpse of who my mum was before she became our mum. The young girl walking home with a boy who made her laugh. The teenager dreaming about leaving her small town. The person shaped by moments she never thought were worth sharing.
If she hadn’t recorded it, we never would have known.