While conducting my extensive research for this morning’s Morning After on the “Reborn” baby doll phenomenon, I came across this startling photograph. This Reborn, though dubbed “Masey,” closely resembles the way I appeared as a newborn child and, in fact, continue to vaguely resemble to this day.

My God, I thought, peering into this window to what could very well be my own baby soul. Could this baby be branded a “Reborn” because it was, in fact, born already, on a summer’s day in 1985? Who is to say who is Reborn and who is simply born?

Behold, my true baby self:

Yes, it is I! Don’t you see? Though one is sneering, topless, and aged one year, while the other is perpetually crying, swathed in lace, and will remain a newborn for all eternity, the resemblance is uncanny, is it not? The red hair! The button nose! The unpleasant demeanor!

Is it possible, I began to wonder, that my mother has commissioned a lifelike baby doll in my image in order to hold close my newborn incarnation for all eternity?

“No,” my mother claimed, in a telephone interview this morning. “That never occurred to me. And now that I’ve heard about it, it sounds kind of creepy, to be honest.” Not only did my mother deny manufacturing a newborn child modeled after my precise facial features and birth-weight, she also denied that baby “Masey” so much as resembled my infant self.

“You never looked that wrinkly, even when you were crying,” my mother said. “You never had a bow in your hair. . . . and the hair doesn’t even look natural, it looks dyed,” she continued. “Plus, the nookie is as big as the kid’s head. You were a big baby.”

Why not, then, commission a true Reborn Amanda, I pressed? “I was overjoyed to see you growing up,” my mother offered up as excuse for why she hadn’t invested in preserving her offspring’s infancy for always. “I don’t need to commission a vinyl baby. My memories, I believe will suffice.”