Special Delivery: Miraculous mail surprises Polson woman
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POLSON — Never tell Julie Stringer that miracles don’t happen.
She found one waiting in her mailbox just a few days before Christmas and says her life will never be the same. At first, the white envelope looked like it contained just another holiday greeting, but the return address was in California. Confused, Julie opened the envelope and pulled out a Christmas card with just two scratchy sentences written inside: “If you are Carol’s daughter, I regret that I was not around to wish you all of the Merry Christmases that have gone by. But I wish you a Merry Christmas this year.”
The note was signed, “Bill Stringer.”
Julie stared at the paper, her heart pounding. This Christmas card sender had her last name.
He knew her mother’s name. In shock, Julie picked up the phone to call her mom.
“She couldn’t believe it either,” Julie said.
It seemed that Julie, who turns 45 in May, had a father after all. She’d never known him, never heard from him, never even seen a picture of him, and now — well, now Julie had to go to work. Thoughts racing, she stuck the card in her pocket and headed to her job as a cashier at Super One Foods. Julie’s Christmas card was a hot topic of conversation at work that evening, and when she got home from work, she decided to see if Bill Stringer had a phone number.
She dialed information, got a listing for Bill, and pressed “1” to have a text message with his phone number sent to her cell. It was after midnight Montana time, and Julie figured she was too nervous to call the man yet anyway.
But suddenly she heard ringing, and a deep voice answered, “Hello?”
For a moment, she froze, and then forced the words out.
“I said, ‘This is Julie,’” she recalled.
The voice on the other end of the line replied, “Who?”
“Julie.”
“Oh my God, oh my God; it’s my daughter,” Julie heard.
There was never any doubt that the man on the phone was her father, Julie said. Bill apologized for his absence in Julie’s life, telling her how much he regretted not being there to watch her grow up, but Julie told him she didn’t want him to worry about the past.
“I’ve had a good life; I’ve had my ups and downs like anyone,” she said.
The two shared an instant connection and immediately “just got each other,” Julie said.
She learned that the father she’d never known had been one step behind her for her whole life; he’d been searching for her for four decades. When Julie was a child, her stepfather had told Bill to stay away, and at age 12, Julie entered foster care and was using her stepdad’s last name. She didn’t go back to the name Stringer until she was 19, so Bill’s task wasn’t easy.
He’d tried to track Julie down using genealogy services. He’d found around 50 Carol Harringtons (Julie’s mother’s name) in the United States, and called most of them. He found 20 Julie Stringers in the country, and called or wrote them.
“It was always a dead end,” Bill said. “I knew it was a long shot (that she’d) still have my last name.”
Bill put every clue he found into a file folder, and kept looking. He couldn’t give up.
“Over the years I always felt an itchiness that part of me was out there,” he said. “I never was at peace.”
About two years ago, Bill found a listing for a Julie Stringer in Polson, Mont., on MyLife.com, but there was no contact information. He searched on Facebook and found a Julie Stringer in Polson, but that happened to be about the time that Julie’s computer went down after a power surge, so he never got an online response from her. Last December, Bill decided to try Facebook again, and this time, he found an address for Julie.
A few days later, Julie got the best Christmas present of her life: a dad. Six weeks later, she boarded a plane for the first time in more than 20 years and went to meet her new family in Fresno, Calif.
“I didn’t know what to think; I was like, ‘That’s my daddy,’” Julie remembered thinking as she caught her first glimpse of Bill. “This whole experience closed a serious void, a hole that I’ve had in me my whole life.”
Bill, too, was overwhelmed.
“It’s just history from there on,” he said of meeting his daughter. “She just blended right in to our family; she is family. She just stole all of our hearts.”
Along with the father she’d always missed, Julie gained a stepmom, two sisters, several nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles — more family than she’d ever dreamed. She immediately felt at home and even got to help celebrate Bill and his wife Val’s 44th wedding anniversary.
“I totally fell in love with this woman; a bond was made there that is very special,” Julie said of Val.
The fact that her dad had never given up looking for her was incomprehensible to Julie. She says the experience of reuniting with him not only brought her peace, but also restored her faith in God.
“I lost my faith a long time ago because of some things that had happened to me, and I kind of found it again,” Julie said. “I just made a peace with myself right before I went to California, and it made the whole experience so worth it.”
Not all tales of birth parents and children finding each other end so happily, and that’s why Julie hadn’t tried to find her father. About five years ago, she watched her son go through the crushing experience of contacting his biological father and getting turned away.
“His dad sat there on the phone and said he wanted nothing to do with him,” Julie said. “I couldn’t do it; I didn’t want to be devastated like that.
“The timing just wasn’t right.”
Bill had his own fears of how his daughter, whom he last saw as a 6-month-old infant, would react if he ever found her.
“I was always afraid, of course, of rejection,” he said.
Now he just wishes Julie lived closer — he’s got a lot of catching up to do.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t have her in her younger life. She’s had some rough, rocky road up to this point,” Bill said.
While Julie struggled to tear herself away from her long-lost family and come back to Polson, her home of 10 years, she says she won’t be moving anytime soon.
“It was very weird leaving them; it was like I had been there my whole life,” Julie said. “Montana is my home; I’ve made this my home. I have my reasons for staying here.”
Those reasons include a hope that her own estranged children will invite her back into their lives, she said. And she couldn’t do without all the friends, coworkers and customers who donated money to help Julie get to California and prayed for her through her adventure.
“Everyone means so much to me here. This is my home,” she said. “Even though I gained this family, I have family here that means so much to me.”
