Southampton Adoption Social Worker Retires After 40 Years of Service

Lori Kling knows, perhaps better than most, that there is more than one way to be a family.

After all, she’s helped create thousands of them.

Over the last four decades, Kling served as an adoption social worker for thousands of parents across New York State — including couples on the East End — and played a key role in facilitating some of the earliest adoptions to gay parents here.

And this year, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the adoption landscape, she decided to retire.

“I’ve been feeling pretty good, but also a little bit at loose ends, I would say — not quite knowing what the next step is, because it’s been a funny time to retire,” she said during a telephone interview from her home in Southampton, where she lives with her husband, Harmon.

“People’s remarks tend to be like, ‘Oh, you’ll find something to keep you busy.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, that sounds awful!’ I don’t want to be kept busy. I have to find something that I want to be doing.”

Kling’s path into social work felt predestined, she said. Growing up in Spring Valley, New York, she looked up to her mother, Edith, a Holocaust survivor who, when she went blind, pivoted from secretarial to social work — first putting herself through college and then graduate school.

“I think social work was always where I was gonna end up, because that’s just the kind of kid I was,” Kling said, adding, “It was in my DNA, in some way.”

She followed a similar trajectory as her mother, first studying psychology and sociology at the University at Albany and specializing in children and family services at the Columbia School of Social Work, where she graduated in 1981.

“I joke, and I blame my parents for this,” Kling started with a laugh, “if somebody once would have said to me, ‘Maybe you want to get a job where you can earn a living?’ It never even occurred to me when I was in college that you should do anything other than what was meaningful to you — and I thank goodness for that, on some level.”

In her second year of Columbia, Kling received a fellowship to work on a project that aimed to identify the obstacles that prevented foster children from moving into adoption. That led to her next step, a foster care agency that had an adoption program, she said, where she would answer telephone calls from prospective parents, many of them seeking an infant.

“I would say, ‘I’m sorry, there are no babies to adopt, but if you would be interested in an older child, or a sibling group, or a child with medical conditions, we can help you,’” she recalled. “But eventually, that became certainly unsatisfying for these families that were calling.

“It’s a fantastic thing to do,” she said of foster care, “and it’s for certain people who have the capacity to do that. But it’s not for everybody.”

Early in her career, Kling remembers a married couple calling the agency where she worked, determined to adopt a child. But she and her co-workers were concerned, she recalled, because they were both developmentally disabled.

“They were steadfast and they went through all this training,” she said of the adoptive parents, “and eventually, we decided that we were going to try to place a child with Down syndrome with them.”

Kling knew that the placement would come with supports from social workers and the child’s school, she said, and ultimately, the adoption was considered a success.

“They were not without challenges, but they were great parents to her,” she said. “Unfortunately, the wife died a few years ago, and I went to the funeral and it was the most moving thing I’ve ever seen, because they had touched so many lives, and their daughter was there, now 13 or 14 years old, with her dad. And there are so many people around her. She had this whole community of people that were supportive of her. So I was able to see that worked for her, for that child.”

She took a deep breath. “If that were the only thing I ever did, it would be enough,” she said.

It was only the beginning. Kling opened a private practice, Adoption Options, in 1988 and accepted her first case on Christmas Eve “because there was no other social worker that was available,” she said.

From there, she went on to help between 50 to 100 families annually, offering them support through the often overwhelming process that is adoption, as well as performing home studies, which is a report that evaluates whether a family is suitable to adopt.

“I would tell every family who called me, ‘Look, you would know right now if you weren’t going to be eligible for adoption, because we’re not looking to rule people out, we’re looking to rule people in, and if there’s any issues, we want to help you with those issues so you can become ready for adoption,’” she said. “We’re not looking for perfect families and I never tried to hold a family up to a standard that they wouldn’t be held up to if they could have had a biological child.”

Once the home study was submitted to the court, the family would receive a New York State certification that qualified adoptive parents, who could then begin looking for a child. Once they were matched, Kling would conduct a post-placement report and visit with the baby — which was, “of course, the best part,” she said.

“It’s just wonderful,” she said. “As a social worker, I have to say that it was like the best work you could possibly do.”

In 1992, Kling was randomly assigned a case that, unbeknownst to her, would become historic — because the couple, a pediatrician and a psychologist, weren’t married. And they were both women.

At the time, same-sex marriage was illegal, and while a single person or married couple could adopt a child, two people who weren’t married could not. Thus, the “Matter of Evan” — the then 6-year-old biological son of petitioner Valerie C. and, eventually, her life partner, Diane F. — was born.

“I went in and met these two lovely people who had this son and it was a wonderful family,” Kling said. “I wrote them a positive report and the case was approved — and it was the first time. From that case, there became this ability for unmarried couples to either adopt together, or to do a second parent adoption.”

Before long, Kling received referrals of other same-sex couples — and it quickly became her “unintended specialty,” she said.

“As I was finishing my practice, I was starting to see people who were transgender and non-binary,” she said. “It was another new layer of this, where it was one further step, but becoming more normalized, in terms of adoption, where people could think about adopting.”

Kling — who has two biological children of her own, David and Erica — emphasized that adoption can be a difficult decision, both for the birth mother and the adoptive parents. In the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she stressed that adoption is not an alternative to abortion.

“Adoption was never, is not, a first resort. It’s just not, it’s too hard,” she said, adding, “I think there’s just this wrong focus. The real beauty of it, all these years, every adoption I’ve ever been involved in, was the mutuality of it.”

During every home study, Kling would inevitably find herself asking prospective parents the same questions, and often found herself surprised by the wide range of answers — providing insight into so many different lives, she said, each giving her a new appreciation for the human experience.

“I guess it’s changed my view about what makes you a child’s parent,” she said of her career. “I remember when my daughter was 2 or 3, I said to her, ‘Why am I your mommy?’ and she said, ‘Because you love me and take care of me.’ And I said, yes, that’s what makes you a good parent.

“There’s a lot of ways to be a family and having your biological child is one way,” she continued, “but there are so many other ways and there are so many other ways families are made — and I was able to see that from very close up.”