My maternal drive should have kicked in and transformed me into an intuitively wise and selfless nurse. But the truth was I felt quite traumatized by the experience – fretful, out of my depth, exhausted and, for the sake of my defiled and defecated-on hair alone, uninclined to repeat the whole sorry ordeal ever again. I was thirty-nine at the time and wrestling with whether I should be having children myself. My night with Muqui only reinforced my suspicion that I came from a long line of not terribly motherly females. If there was such a thing as maternal instinct, I was pretty sure I didn’t
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