I was eight years old when I was given my first thresher maw.
It happened the day after my first fight with my mother over school pictures. She had a dress picked out for me to wear, and I, willful and contrary child that I was, decided that I didn’t want to wear dresses anymore, actually.
She lost that fight - I wore a blouse and pants. But the next day she brought this thresher maw up to my room, said he was mine now. He was to live in my closet, and I was supposed to take care of him. When I asked why a thresher maw had to live in my closet, she rolled her eyes.
“He’s just a baby,” she said dismissively. “I grew up with a thresher maw in my closet. Everyone does. It’s no big deal.”
“But why do I have to have one?”
All she would say was, “he’s going to help you make good choices.”
Once I realized he couldn’t leave the closet, he was pretty easily dealt with, at least. I waited until he was asleep, then moved all of my tomboyish clothing out of my closet and into my drawers. The thresher maw could live with my dresses - I wasn’t using them anyway. Sometimes I’d have to go in my closet for something my parents had stored in there, and he’d always take a swipe at me, but usually he didn’t succeed at taking a piece out of me.
Usually.
It wasn’t long after that, though, that the first thresher maw appeared in my classes at school.
He was bigger, and a lot scarier than the baby who lived in my closet (who I guess was kind of a runt). Ostensibly, he was there to enforce the classroom rules. In reality, the boys could all but hang from the ceiling without making it mad. The girls, meanwhile, would get terrorized the instant any of them looked like they might be contemplating mischief.
Naturally, school quickly became one of my least favorite places - especially after the boys learned they could bait the thresher maw into snapping at me when I had to go to my cubby.
The year after that, I was assigned a personal thresher maw in addition to the classroom thresher maw. I didn’t pay enough attention, didn’t show enough interest in classroom topics or activities, apparently. When I asked how having a vicious thresher maw inside my desk was supposed to help me pay attention, the adults just threatened to give me a bigger, nastier thresher maw. So I learned not to complain.
Then my mother brought home the biggest, meanest, most vicious thresher maw I’d ever seen in my entire life and gave him free run of the first floor of the house. My room quickly became my refuge - for whatever reason, the big thresher maw respected the territorial claim of the little one in my closet. And reading became my escape - an escape into a world where I could be free of the constant terror of thresher maws.
There weren’t any people like me in the books I read - no children whose adults were constantly terrorizing them with thresher maws. But there also weren’t any thresher maws at all in those stories, and that was enough.
I couldn’t spend all my time in my room, however. I was expected to participate in “Family Time”, of which the giant thresher maw was always a part.
In truth, my mother preferred the thresher maw to me, her actual child. She’d often “joke” about feeding me to the thresher maw, but no one ever laughed.
In high school, I started to get a sense of which spaces would be safe from thresher maws, and under what conditions they would remain so. One of the instructors at my Tae Kwon Do school was a thresher maw, but he was pretty chill, as long as you never pointed out that he worked the girls twice as hard as the boys.
I managed to get out of my thresher-maw-loving community when I went to college. And… it’s not that there weren’t thresher maws in university, exactly, because there were. For one, my childhood thresher maws refused to be parted from me. My closet maw and I were almost buddies at that point. But my mother insisted on budding a new baby thresher maw from her giant, and the baby hated me just as much as the original did.
But since it was either take him or give up on going to university…
What else could I do?
Even so, university was the breath of freedom that I’d desperately needed. As university students, we had the freedom to set our own schedules and routines. And on a big campus like ours, it was very easy to order your life such that you mostly didn’t have to worry about running into them. The frats and sororities, of course, were riddled with them. But. Whatever. I didn’t have to have anything to do with Greek life.
Life went on, and for the most part I was lucky. Lucky to find a husband who had grown up with thresher maws, and knew that they weren’t anything to joke about. And I was lucky to have access to thresher maw training courses. They were insanely hard to access, and very expensive, of course. But they did at least make my personal thresher maws more tolerable to live with.
When I got pregnant with my kid, I went on a thresher maw mitigation spree. The ones I couldn’t get rid of, I forced through training program after training program, determined that my kid wasn’t going to live under constant terror the way I did. No way, no how.
And things went pretty well until the pandemic, when we were all locked in our houses. My thresher maws started to go crazy from being trapped inside all day. Before I knew it, my closet maw - my childhood buddy - had merged with the clone of my mother’s maw and a clone of the classroom maw from school that I hadn’t even known was living with me - apparently he’d stowed away with me years ago and was just very good at hiding.
So now I was trapped in my house with a ravenous three-headed thresher maw the size of a Volkswagon who was hungry for my flesh specifically. And I realized that I had a choice. I could let the damned thing kill me, or I could start learning how to fight back.
Of course, in our very pro-maw society, that made me an instant target of hate. Getting eaten by thresher maws was part of the natural order - if it was my time, then it was my time. Fighting back against the maws was a perversion of the highest order.
I did it anyway.
I started small - with not letting people use pro-maw language around me, and even that was a bridge too far for my mother. After multiple visits where she reminisced fondly about the childhood maw that hated me, then broke down in tears because she felt attacked when I told her in no uncertain terms that her maw was homicidal and had almost killed me on many occasions, I finally told her she could either apologize or remove herself from my life.
She chose to remove herself from my life.
My husband was a blessing. “Teach me how to fight the maws,” he said. He didn’t care that they weren’t trying to eat him, that it was something he shouldn’t have to do. “Teach me how to fight the maws”.
And he did. Truthfully, in the beginning he was better than I was at spotting the maws when they were sneaking up on me.
My kung fu school is another blessing. They are emphatically anti-thresher maw. No thresher maw sifus or assistants allowed, and they fumigate regularly to chase off any maws that do happen to sneak in.
It took a hell of a lot of effort, but I chopped the clone heads off of my closet maw, and now… Well. Our relationship is complicated. He’s been with me my entire life, knows how to get through cracks in my foundation that I don’t even know are there. Mostly he just makes a nuisance of himself, forces me to work around him. But sometimes he’ll pitch a fit, and let me tell you - getting chased by a thresher maw isn’t something you recover from as quickly in your 40s as you do in your 20s.
To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be rid of him. He’s a tough old bastard, and no matter how hard I hit him, he never stays away for long.
And.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I should never have been given that maw in the first place. Siccing thresher maws on children isn’t a loving or healthy way to parent your kids. And I shouldn’t have to worry about the people who wish harm on me because of my “anti-maw lifestyle”. Children shouldn’t ever have to accept that carving off pieces of themselves is the price of safety.
I deserved better.
And so do you.