PORT ST. LUCIE - Inside the Perkins’ restaurant on U.S. 1 near Walton Road, Virginia Symins cradled her arms around two bouquets of flowers, scraping the skin on the inside of her right thumb with her nails.

Outside the restaurant, 16-year-old Cecile Corcoran made the same nervous gesture as she sat inside her adopted family’s van just before noon today.

In just a few minutes the mother and daughter would meet for the first time since Symins and her husband Gregory gave their daughter up for adoption nearly 17 years ago. But in that moment Corcoran, who began communicating with Symins after Symins connected with the girl’s mother Barbara on Facebook, was too nervous to make the first step.

The Syminses (from left) Sage, Virginia and Gregg pose with Cici Corcoran at a reunion at the Perkins in Port St. Lucie. (Sarah Grile / The Post)

“She asked me, ‘What if they don’t like who I am? What if I don’t meet their expectations?’” Barbara Corcoran said, tears in her eyes. “I told her what they were hoping for was everything that she already was.”

Eventually Cecile Corcoran got out of the van and stood outside the restaurant, where her biolocigal parents and her 12-year-old brother Sage came out to hug her for the first time.

The initial reunion was an exchange of awkward hugs and furtive glances as both sets of parents, Cecile and Sage stood in a semi-circle in front of the restaurant.

Virginia Symins clutched a twisted, damp dinner napkin in her hands and dabbed at tears. Barbara Corcoran clung to a purple and blue box of Kleenex. Cecile shoved her hands into the pockets of her black pullover hoodie and chewed on her bottom lip.

About 17 years ago, the Symins and Corcorans hat met at the same Perkins restaurant to finalize the details of a private adoption.

Gregory Symins said he was just 17 at the time Virginia found out she was pregnant and the couple wasn’t married.

“I wasn’t mentally ready for a child then,” Virginia Symins said.

Barbara and her husband Chick Corcoran, meanwhile, were still reeling from a miscarriage that thwarted their attempts to have a child of their own.

Barbara Corcoran’s mother, who worked with the Syminses at a Port St. Lucie Pizza Hut, put them in touch and the couples privately arranged an adoption.

Gregory Symins after meeting the couple he realized they could give their daughter a better life than they could.

“We prayed every day that someone would feel that way about us,” Chick Corcoran said.

The Corcorans, who now live in Georgia, said they told Cecile she was adopted from the time she could understand the concept. They said they always expected her to one day search for her biological parents.

Virginia Symins created a Facebook page several months ago, hoping to find the Corcorans. The couples lost touch shortly after the adoption.

Barbara Corcoran soon joined the social networking site herlself, and in September she received a friend request from Virginia Symins.

She said she decided to leave it up to Cecile and the two talked about it until the next day. The teenager still remembers when she and her mother made the nerve-wraking decision.

“We were sitting at the computer about to accept the request and it was like, ‘You do it! No, you do it!’ And so finally I closed my eyes and I pressed the button,” Cecile Corcoran said.

After their lunch at Perkins this afternoon, the families planned to visit Corcoran’s mother, who still lives in Port St. Lucie. The Syminses live in Tampa.

As the families sat at a table just a few feet away from where they finalized the adoption, the nerves were still alive well into what was supposed to be a lunch meeting. Cecile Corcoran couldn’t eat. She clung to her adopted mother’s hand, dragging the nail on her forefinger across her thumb again and again.

“I don’t think there’s any skin left on the inside of my thumb,” she said.

It was at that monent that Virginia Symins, tears still in her eyes, lifted her hand and and showed her daughter her own thumb, her skin flaked and raw from doing the same thing. For a second their eyes met, and both mother and daughter smiled.

“It’s hard to say just one thing I like about her,” Virginia Symins said of her daughter. “It just…everything.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Stuart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.