In a recent episode of Modern Family, Phil Dunphy tried to “create a moment” with his teenaged daughter, Alex. He despaired not being as legendary as astronaut Eugene Cernan, who claimed that he wrote his daughter’s initials on the surface of the moon (thus becoming the dad all dads hate). This Father’s Day, I wanted to highlight a wonderful man known as Mr. Steve, who has the distinction of being my father.

My dad tapped the maple tree on our backyard and made homemade maple syrup with me and my sister.

My dad was an honorary Girl Scout and a “Camp Dawg” who accompanied me and my sister’s troops on countless camp outs and field trips.

My dad can quote every single line from The Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Every. Single. Line.

My dad volunteers as a ham radio operative for the Head of the Charles Regatta, the Walk for Hunger and the Boston Marathon. He helps people who can’t finish the races and radios response teams to pick them up when they’re too tired, hot or sick to finish.

My dad has never once felt the need to apologize for his eccentric personality, and by his example he taught me that I never need to apologize for my personality either.

My dad wore Funny Nose Glasses and Dread Pirate Roberts masks to make us laugh. He knew that even when we rolled our eyes, it was our special teenage way of saying “I love you.”

My dad took my sister and I to the Museum of Science to exercise our brains and to the Museum of Fine Arts to exercise our imaginations. He waxes poetic about both the Vermeers stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the mysteries of physics and biology.

My dad has helped rebuild slums in Brazil, Mississippi towns after Katrina, and Habitat for Humanity houses in New Jersey.

He shovels snow for our neighbors, sands the church driveway and once threatened to put ice in my friend’s baptismal water.

My dad read out loud to me and my sister and filled our minds with stories of the Big Woods, Bag End, Rivendell and Indian Territory.

My dad has always supported his strange daughters, even though we’d rather be writers and readers than engineers like himself.

My dad enters an annual Fantasy Iditarod League, thus outstriping every other fantasy league ever created on the scale of awesomeness.

My dad raised me on a steady diet of Pink Floyd, Godspell and Don McLean. To repay him I introduced him to Mumford and Sons, Adele and Flogging Molly.

My dad drove across the country with both of his daughters. He took one to Idaho and the other to California. We traveled down Route 66 together, eating in themed diners and absorbing the rich history middle- and south-western America had to offer us.

I hate to say it, but… sorry Eugene Cernan; you’ve got nothin’ on my dad.

Today is Mother’s Day! Hopefully by now everyone has called/texted/hugged/sent flowers to your mothers. If you haven’t, you should probably rectify that. I’ll wait here. Ready? Okay.

Here’s the thing about my mom: she’s unbelievably amazing. I’m gonna level with you all… I can be kind of a difficult daughter. I get really excited about random things, I love to talk about these random things, and it can be kind of hard to get me to shut up. I also have a penchant for calling my mother, crying, three time zones away.

I talk a lot about the “quietly feminist” media that my mother raised my sister and I on. I remember very distinctly one evening when I was in college and I started waxing on and on about the representation of women in… something. (Like I said, it can be hard to get me to shut up). My mom turned to my best friend, Elspeth, and said “I don’t know where she gets this.” Elspeth responded, “Kathi, she gets it from you.”

You see, my mother didn’t raise me to be a feminist. She raised me to be a human being. She raised me to be a woman who deserves respect, admiration, and equality. I don’t think the word “feminist” was ever expressly uttered in my household until I was in high school, but by then the seeds had been planted. It’s not that my mother thinks of “feminism” as a “dirty word” (as in “I’m not a feminist, but I believe in gender equality!”). See, my mother didn’t need to tell my sister and I to be feminists, because she lead the way through her example.

My mother loves to tell the story of the time some family friends came over for dinner. They arrived while my mom was in the kitchen and the TV was on a Patriots game. Our friend (a man), called out “Hey, Steve, what’s the score?” My mom appeared and said “oh, Steve doesn’t watch football. That’d be me.” My mother never sat me down and said “Laura, lots of people think that football is a ‘man’s sport,’ but they’re wrong because women can enjoy football too.” She just enjoyed the crap out of football.

My mother is the woman who encouraged both her daughters to become pastors (until she realized that neither of us were remotely called to be pastors), who watched Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman and Star Trek: Voyager, who lead my sister’s Girl Scout Troop for over ten years. My mother always supports my sister and I–even though we’re writers, even though I went to art school, even though I moved to Chicago when I was 18 and Los Angeles when I was 23 and changed my mind eight months later.

I know everyone thinks that their mothers are the best mothers ever… but in my case it’s totally true.