Every year I promise myself that this time it will be different. This time, I say, this time I will get my dad’s birthday card into the mail by my birthday. That way it will arrive before his birthday. Not like every other year where I forget until his actual birthday, so he gets it late.

And most years, despite all that, I forget.

Forget isn’t quite the right word, because I set reminders on all of my devices. But those reminders invariably show up while I’m in the middle of something. “Okay, when I get home, I’ll take care of it,” I think.

Again, and again, and again…

At about this point each year I console myself in a couple ways. I do it nearly every year, so why sweat it? It’s been many years since he sent a birthday card or acknowledged my birthday in any way (and back when he did do it, the envelopes were almost always addressed in my step-mother’s handwriting, so we know she was the one making them happen). We’ve never been close.

All of those things are true.

But they don’t subtract anything from this truth: if it were a priority, I wouldn’t keep procrastinating until it was late.

One time when I was making self-deprecating remarks about this, a friend asked why, since I nearly always miss it, and since he doesn’t seem to care, why do I keep trying. None of the answers I came up with are terribly noble.

It’s not that I think I can somehow repair our relationship if I just remembered his birthday card. At least not on a conscious level. I’ve been resigned for a very long time to our relationship being the way it is forever.

And it’s not that I want to be the better person by remembering birthdays when he doesn’t seem to. To be perfectly honest, so many parts of our temperaments are so similar, I would not be surprised to learn that most years he thinks about my birthday before it comes around, and tells himself that this year he’s going to surprise me by calling or something, and then he forgets until afterward.

I would like to just not be the kind of person who always forgets to send his dad a birthday card. Or his sisters. Or his cousins. Or his…