ADOPTION CAN MAKE GAIN OUT OF A LOSS.

Byline: Kathleen Vallee Stein Personal Perspective

I work in a family-friendly office. My fellow employees and I will stop what we are doing to admire a newborn baby, a 3-year-old niece or a child home from college. We can show off our progeny with impunity.

Lucky for us, our boss knows that spending a few minutes gushing over a child is time well spent. We don't have to hide our pride in our families because it doesn't diminish our dedication to our work. Our boss is a wise woman who is first in line to kiss a baby.

One day last week, a co-worker walked through the office, introducing her long-lost daughter to her fellow staffers. Most of us knew the story. Our co-worker had become pregnant when she was in her late teens, brought the baby to term and surrendered her daughter to an adoptive couple who raised her with love and care.

The long-lost daughter was born after Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land. My co-worker had a choice in the matter and chose to give the crisis pregnancy an opportunity to live.

When she introduced her daughter to me, I felt pride and the mother- daughter connection, with a difference. I was well-acquainted with her other daughter, born five years later within the bonds of marriage. The love was there for both girls; the connection was different.

I felt free enough to ask the mother and long-lost daughter to stand together as I observed the family resemblance. They willingly agreed and locked arms, hamming it up. There was a physical resemblance. There was a tiny link between the two but not much. After all, they were really strangers.

As I watched the two women strike a pose, I tried to understand the pain my co-worker must have felt as she made the decision to bear the difficult months of pregnancy, the physical agony of childbirth and the lifelong pain of separation from her child.

The two were smiling broadly as they posed for me while I looked for a family resemblance. I saw it loud and clear. The mother gave life and the daughter lived it. The mother was too young and unprepared to raise her baby, but she didn't shy away. She did the right thing.

I've always known about adoption and have heard numerous stories about biological parents and their reunions with their biological children. Until that moment, I had never really stood face to face with the miracle of adoption.

Adoption takes a loss and makes it a gain. Adoption solves problems for people at opposite ends of a terrible spectrum, who may never meet, but meet each other's needs.

A very young woman gambled and lost in her search for love. A sad and frustrated couple gambled and lost in the search for fertility. The birth mother did not, however, let her child lose the opportunity to have a family.

That is what biological mothers and adoptive parents know when they make the precious exchange. Both have traded disillusionment for hope, despair for joy and a solution to a mutual problem.

As the long-lost daughter left the office and things returned to normal, I was left with warm and wonderful thoughts about adoption. How rare in life it is when a wrong can become a right. In the case of adoption, it can truly happen.

The birth mother can place her baby in the loving hands of a family and continue on her journey to adulthood. The adoptive parents can fill the hole in their hearts with a tiny bundle in need of love.

I cannot know the thoughts of my co-worker as she went back to work after her long-lost daughter left. Surely her feelings of pride are tempered by regret, her feelings of love diminished by distance and surrender.

At the heart of it, she must know she did the right thing for her daughter's family. She gave the most precious thing a mother can give her child, a family of her own.