Infant Bonding

In my research for the new online Postpartum Doula workshop I will be teaching, I have been reading a lot about infant bonding. At Birth Psychology I was reading this and was struck by one woman's response:

I had herpes, and they whisked the baby away to intensive care for observation and wouldn't even let me touch him for three whole days. I grieved. I felt that he had died. Finally on the third day I went to the nursery and demanded him. But I felt very little when I got him. I know it's nonsensical, but my emotional feeling was that he had died, and this was someone else. I wanted desperately to love him, and I knew that nursing would be the fastest way to make up for the bonding I had missed, so I made myself nurse him and I hated it for a long time. When I would sit down to nurse him I would feel so impatient I could scream. It took months for me to feel that I was really his mother, and he was really my baby. Finally it did happen, but it was awful for a long time.

Wow. Deja Vu. Here is my story with its parallels:

I had an emergency cesarean section under general anesthesia and while going under I prayed that God would be kind and save my baby as I believed I would not survive. I did survive yet the experience left me detached as a result of the emotional trauma I had experienced. Four hours after I went under the knife, a screaming infant was placed in my arms in my postpartum room. I searched the face of this strange little thing, almost frantically looking for something, anything, that would identify him as my own. It was only when I saw the stork bite on his forehead, the same mark of both my sister and my beloved Grandfather, that I relaxed and a warm flood of love flowed over me. Bonding came quickly as I fell in love with this tiny baby, yet it was a fine thread that could have been easily broken with a far different bonding outcome had I not been able to identify with him.