I’ve endured the stares, the comments and the surprised eyes when people see me with him. I’ve answered countless questions about what life is like with him. I did my best to hide him during my junior high and high school years. But for one important moment of my high school career, I wanted him to be there.

My father is 80 years old. Before I hit my teen years, the 59-year age gap didn’t faze me. We’d eat ice cream at Braum’s on lazy Sunday afternoons and stop at the gas station after school to buy candy. When people joked about their parents remembering when ice cream and candy cost a nickel, I never thought twice about the fact that my dad really did remember when they cost a nickel. I never questioned when Dad drove his 1986 wood-paneled station wagon 25 mph on a 40 mph street. That was all I knew.

When I made it to junior high, the questions from friends and teachers started to bother me. “Why is your mom so young?” “Is that your grandpa?” Nobody seemed to understand that I was a product of the Vietnam War and I couldn’t expect them to understand the circumstances of my parents’ union. My mother was one of the 220,000 “war brides” who came to the United States after the war in Vietnam ended. My dad, an Army veteran, brought home a half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese wife and started a family of four children born between 1975 and 1985. Mama was 33 when she gave birth to me; Daddy was 59.

By age 14, I was becoming more insecure with my father’s age. I made him drop me off in the back of the junior high so I could avoid any other potential questions about him from friends. I made him pick me up at the grocery store across the street. Daddy figured this was a good way to avoid the traffic jams in front of school; I figured differently. For a while, this seemed to be a good tactic to avoid intimate questions about my dad’s age.

Then, one day in junior high, my best friend posed a burning question: “What’s going to happen when you graduate?”

Jessica’s brown eyes locked with mine. I knew exactly what she meant. What if my dad didn’t live to see me graduate from high school? It wasn’t a completely unreal question. My dad was 73 and a two-pack-a-day, non-filtered Pall Mall smoker for more than 60 years. He had a hacking cough and would choke for oxygen at times.

I broke down. Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. I feared that my father would not be at the stadium the night I would walk across the stage, donned in a baby blue cap and gown. It would be the night I lived for, because of the way my dad pushed me to excel in school. I didn’t want all those years of hard work and discipline to go unseen by the man for whom I had tried to make myself perfect.

My father had certain expectations of me. Though my three brothers were active in sports when they were in school, I was the one who wasn’t allowed to participate in anything my father deemed distracting to a girl’s education. This ruled out choir, cheerleading and track. At that point in life, my relationship with my father became bitter and strained. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to do these things. No matter how many times I would bring home straight A’s or how many complimentary notes my teachers would send home to my parents, nothing was good enough to make my dad loosen his grip on my education. I resented my father for treating me differently, yet I longed for his approval.

In high school, I didn’t have to work as hard to hide my father. I got my own car my sophomore year and was freed from Daddy’s snail-paced driving. I was so involved in the school newspaper that I dismissed the fact that my father’s control over my extracurricular activities was what led to my interest in journalism. I knew my dad was proud of me for being a leader, though he never dared to compliment my efforts.

As high school came to an end, I pretended not to care that Daddy wasn’t at the basketball court to see me crowned homecoming queen, or that he wasn’t really involved in my prom. Those kinds of things, according to Daddy, weren’t as important as me being an honor student and going to a good college. I tried not to let it bother me; I figured if I traded off those milestones for the last hurrah of graduation night, things would be on my side.

I began my countdown to graduation. Daddy, 76 going on 77, was in for the home stretch. My brothers would chauffeur him to the event that four years earlier I had cried my eyes out thinking he wouldn’t be alive to attend. The wood-paneled station wagon would stay home that evening. Graduation would be the night that made everything that was wrong with our relationship right.

From the field, I scanned the bleachers to spot my family. My eyes quickly focused in on my father, hunched over in his seat reading the graduation pamphlet. I laughed to myself knowing that he was probably cursing the sticky Arkansas heat as he compared the other kids’ scholarships and college decisions to his own daughter’s achievements and school choice.

After hours of waiting for the last section of the alphabet to rise for their diplomas, I felt tears form in my eyes once again. “We made it!” one friend said to me as we walked slowly to the platform that we would soon walk across. “He made it,” is all I could think as I walked across the stage.

After accepting my diploma, I shot a glance up at my father. He was gazing proudly down on his last child and only daughter as she graduated from high school. My bitterness for him subsided, if only for the night.

I think back and commend my father’s strength and will to stick it out with me, both mentally and physically, through high school. He quit smoking when I was a sophomore, when he began to feel himself slowing down. He put up with my rebellious attitude and overactive mouth when I was still figuring out who I was. We both took care of ourselves and matured gracefully enough to make it to graduation.

I can’t help but worry Daddy won’t be there to watch me walk down the hill in May 2008. Every time I miss a call from home and Mom leaves a desperate voicemail to call her back, I prepare myself for the worst news. I’ve learned, though, not to dwell on something I can’t control.   Even though he may not be there to walk me down the aisle or see me become a mother, those were never the life priorities he instilled in me. He only cared that I would be able to take care of myself, for he knew that one day he would no longer be there to watch me with every milestone I passed in my life.