At 12 1/2 months old, most mothers are training their babies to take a sippy cup.

When our daughter was 12 1/2 months old, we were training her how to take a bottle from us. Of course, we got nothing but support—she needed the nutrition, she needed the closeness, we needed the closeness, it fostered attachment both ways. No one questioned it.

A year later, at a chronological age of 2 with a family age of 1, maybe some people thought it odd that she still took a bottle several times a day. Being so teeny though, most people didn’t think twice about the bottle coddling going on.

Now, she’s 4…actually, 4 1/3 to be exact. And, yes, while her family age is behind that, it too is now 3 1/3.

Every morning, this little one stumbles into our bedroom, wiping the sleep from her eyes, often with her “ren ren” (aka her most precious blanket friend ever). She climbs into bed between us, gets real close to one of our faces, and says, “Can I have a hot big bottle?”

And, every morning, one of us comes downstairs, searching for one of only 3 functional bottles we have left and give her exactly what she wants. She lays calmly in our bed and slowly sucks down a bottle of warm rice milk as she has done since soon after she came home 3 years ago. Most days, she wants another one in the afternoon when she’s feeling tired. And, she’ll predictably ask for one when she’s upset or is anxious or is just not feeling good. And, I give it to her. Then, every night before bed, she wants one more.

Seems a little strange to give a 4-year-old a bottle still, I know. While she never is a public drinker, I’m sure if she were, we’d turn a few heads. But, here’s the thing—I. don’t. care.

For the first year of her life, arguably the most critical development time for a human being, she was not fed on demand. She was fed on a schedule, because that’s they way things work when you have lots of babies and few caregivers. What should have been comfort-giving early on likely became a race to get as much as she could before it was taken away.

One day, she’ll say to me in a tired voice, “I want my hot big bottle” as she lays on my shoulder, and someone will say, “A bottle? You don’t want a bottle. Only babies drink bottles!” At some point, she’ll hear it one too many times and decide she can’t drink a bottle anymore. But, until that day, when she tells me she’s too big for a bottle, I’ll keep stumbling downstairs to our kitchen, looking to see if any of the 3 bottles are clean to make one for her. And, I’ll hand it to her and watch her quietly drink it as she plays with my covers.

It brings her comfort, makes her feel safe, makes her feel protected, and reminds her that we’ll give her whatever she needs. Yes, my 4-year-old still takes a bottle.

We’ve been practicing spitting. Maybe it’s more like drooling actually. Whatever you may want to call it, we’ve been practicing getting saliva from where it belongs to somewhere else.

She doesn’t know why. And, that’s fine for now. We’ll send it away and wait a bit. We’ll find out some random interesting stuff, hopefully some things that will help her later as she wrestles with her story. Maybe she can pull that info out when someone tells her she doesn’t “look Chinese” or when she has to do a school project on ancestry. Maybe it will even prove helpful when the doctor asks her again for some sort of medical history. It won’t give her all the answers, but maybe it will help.

But, I’m hoping for more than that. I’m hoping that another parent like me somewhere is thinking the same things for their daughter, maybe for their son. I’m hoping that they’re practicing spitting too and that our stories get woven together as our children discover they are family—cousins or maybe even siblings.

It’s controversial in the adoption community, you know, searching for your child’s history. Some say parents searching violates their children’s rights to choose and do it themselves. But, others say that if your child has a chance of learning anything ever, you have to do whatever it is you can do sooner rather than later. And, that’s where my view falls. I know it could get messy. But, in all actuality, it’s already messy.

I read the words of one adopted person:

How can you prepare someone for this tangle of roots? This road of reunification is not reunification. If it were unified to begin with we wouldn’t be where we are. But it is a road of meeting—meeting each other where we are in life.

It is a tangle of roots. This beautiful child before me with a sister who adores her and two brothers committed to her no matter what, with a mommy and daddy who laugh at her antics and marvel at her beauty, with an extended family who see her as another treasure in our family tree…this child also has a finder, ayis who cared for her for a year and heard her infant cries and bathed her tiny body and worried about her wearing enough layers of clothing, and a father who may or may not have known she even existed, an extended family, someone who had to know she was coming into the world, and a mother who felt her grow in her womb and birthed her only to say goodbye to her. It’s a tangle of roots for sure.

But, if there’s something that I can do now that may help comb out a tangle or two when she is older and those knots become increasingly painful, I’m in. As soon as we know she can get enough spit out to fill this little 23andMething, we’re sending it in. And, then we’ll wait, a couple months at first and then maybe years really. But, one day, one day, we may find a part of her family she doesn’t yet know, a part of our family we don’t yet know. Until then, we’ll be the family we are, growing stronger daily despite our tangle of roots.