🗣️ My father has never once told me he is proud of me, even after everything

Completed a genuinely difficult professional certification last month after nearly two years of studying alongside a full time job, something I was honestly quite proud of achieving myself given how much I had to actually sacrifice in terms of free time and energy to actually get there successfully. Told my father about it over the phone, expecting at minimum some direct acknowledgment given how significant this particular achievement genuinely was for me personally. His response was a fairly flat that is good, followed almost immediately by a question about whether this would actually translate into a raise at my current job, moving straight past the actual accomplishment itself toward its practical financial implications instead, which is honestly a pattern that has repeated itself across basically every significant milestone in my entire life so far, university graduation, my first real job offer, even my own wedding day itself years ago now. My mother has told me privately more than once that he genuinely is proud, that it is simply not something he knows how to actually express directly given how he himself was raised by his own fairly stern and undemonstrative father decades earlier. I believe her explanation intellectually, and I do understand generational patterns like this genuinely exist and repeat themselves across families, but understanding the specific reason behind it does not fully soften the actual disappointment of never once directly hearing those particular words from him myself. I have tried directly asking him once, fairly vulnerably, whether he was proud of me specifically, and he seemed genuinely uncomfortable with the direct question itself, eventually saying of course in a way that felt more like relief at the conversation ending than any kind of genuine emotional expression behind the actual words themselves in that moment. At this point I have mostly stopped actively expecting it, finding other, smaller sources of validation instead, but a part of me still holds out some quiet hope that it might eventually happen someday before it becomes genuinely too late for either of us to actually say it directly to each other. Has anyone else navigated having a parent who clearly cares deeply but genuinely struggles to ever say it out loud directly, and did you ever eventually hear the actual words you were quietly waiting for the whole time?