I have spent most of my life trying to impress my father; to make him proud of me. Is that goal so strange though? Doesn’t every child feel that way at some point?

My father has basically shaped my life. It is because of him I love St. Louis Cardinals baseball with a passion. It is because of him that I pay attention to college basketball and make up a bracket when March Madness rolls around. I strive to be funny like him, to be witty like him and to be smart like him. He filled my childhood with laughter, stories, pop culture and my most cherished memories of “insta-skits”. He would take something that happen and basically turn it into a glorified improv show, which would make my sister and me laugh for hours and hours.

While my father and I share this kind of connection, he has never said “I love you” to me. He’s not that kind of person really. He’ll say it to his parents who live far away, but not to me. For the longest time I didn’t really care that he hadn’t said anything like that to me. It was understood. There were unspoken “I love you”s throughout my life. The times where we’d sit watching T.V and talking; the times where we’d listen to NPR on the way home from somewhere; the times we would just talk about light stuff or deep stuff.

It is because of my father that I became interested in writing. I wanted us to have something to talk about while I got older. He too had dreams of being a writer, but he’s very humble about his abilities, which are far better than mine will ever be. I thought that if I began writing we’d have an even deeper connection. I began winning contests and getting published. He was the first person I wanted to tell every time I got the news.

For every role model I have, from David Sedaris to Ira Glass, I don’t think my father realizes that the person I most want to be is him.