Until my daughter stopped breathing through her nose, I might’ve been hard-pressed to tell an adenoid from an adrenal. After she had allergy testing and ear infections, and one actual case of Scarlet Fever that sent me into a Little Women spiral, the professionals finally said it was time to get rid of the adenoids. The glands had finished the dirty work of fighting off childhood germs, the doctor said. As soon as she explained how expendable the adenoids were, my imagination clicked weirdly: I started to picture migrant workers in the back of H’s throat, harvesting the fruit that no one else wanted to pick, doing the backbreaking work of nourishing a nation. No surprise this is where my mind went: in the news that spring, I saw near-daily pictures of migrant families being separated or men languishing in an El Salvadoran detention center or students being snatched off the streets. Rhetoric of removal was heavy in the air.
The first medical notation of adenoids was likely in 1661, by a German scientist named Conrad Victor Schneider. By the 1800s, the glands were being removed to alleviate some ear problems, and eventually to treat things like cognitive issues, sleep apnea, and speech difficulties. No anesthesia was used during the surgery until the 1920s, and early tools for removal included the bare fingernail, a detail I cannot type without retching.4
My 21st-century daughter, on the other hand, was dressed in scrubs with puppies on them, knocked out, given IV anesthesia, and fed slushies immediately upon waking.
Unlike tonsils, adenoids shrink until they disappear by adulthood. H’s were bigger to start with, and not shrinking yet, and now basically just sitting in her mouth, taking up space. When the doctor described them as such dead weight, I again thought of the ways that people sometimes talk about immigrants sitting in the Home Depot parking lot, looking for work. Are they contributing anything? They’ve overstayed their welcome. Are they even supposed to be here?
How do we know who is supposed to be where?
The Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council, along with an organization called Over Zero, published a study called The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America in 2023. This new measure, with its wonderful name, reported findings from a national survey that “demonstrated the connections between belonging and critical life outcomes,” which are many. It describes belonging as “a more general inference, drawn from cues, events, experiences, and relationships, about the quality of fit or potential fit between oneself and a setting.”5 No surprise that humans are hard-wired to find community and thrive when they do.
The Barometer describes “fit” in five life settings: family, friends, workplace, local community, and the nation. And belonging is not synonymous with social relationships. A person can feel like they belong in a place where they don’t have friends; a person can feel lonely in a place where they belong; in some settings, a person can feel like they don’t belong, even in a room full of friends. Belonging also doesn’t always have to do with people at all. A person can feel belonging in relation to a landscape, a country, a church.
If you spent a lifetime hearing hymns on Sundays like I did, you might know what it can mean to belong to a church. There is immense, binding power in standing with a group of people, facing the same direction, and singing. This is true in any choir, but in church, the music is infused with lyrics about heaven and hope and glory and God. You feel the heavy offering plate pass through your hands as it moves among the congregation, you throw back a tiny cup of grape juice with a hundred or more people in unison, you see the same little biddies sitting in the same pew week after week, with jaunty hats and pin curls.
I grew up in these congregations, so I tried to find one when I moved out on my own. The first was an Episcopal church, where I heard the tall, bald pastor. This church practiced even more grandiose rituals of worship than I was used to, but I met some friends and found a spot I liked on the left side of the sanctuary, and I led the music a time or two with several other adults who were clearly wary of letting someone new into the fold. But my voice was sweet and strong at the same time, one of them said, so I could help.
The King Uzziah sermon was one of the last I heard in that Episcopal church, because I was asked to stop taking communion when the staff found out I’d never been baptized. It’s not official Episcopal doctrine, but in this church, only people who’d been formally baptized were welcome to receive the bread and wine. In other words, only people who had followed the letter of the law were allowed to commune with the creator of the universe. I was encouraged to get baptized and then resume taking communion; of course, they said, they still wanted me to be part of the church family. Nothing about it felt like family anymore. I was in my early twenties then, a post-college newborn trying to figure out who I was. In the midst of my wandering and wondering, though, I was pretty sure that if God existed and someone approached the table in an effort to connect, God wouldn’t be too interested in checking papers.
4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28543437/
5 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 58
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