Watching the Oscars earlier this week, I was struck by an obvious similarity.
For several weeks now, I was convinced my baby daughter looked remarkably like someone famous but had failed to put my finger on it until I saw the clips for the Best Picture nominees.
My baby girl is the splitting image of Benjamin Button.
At a certain angle, it is impossible to distinguish the two, which for several reasons, is rather disconcerting.
First, Benjamin Button is a boy. Second, he is mostly computer-generated. And third, he looks like a freak.
To thoroughly underscore my sharp observation to my disbelieving wife, I took off my glasses and briefly placed them over our half-naked little girl's face and held her upright.
She was wrinkled, bald, bespectacled and bemused. She was Benjamin Button. It was a most curious case.
We are not sure whether to seek a second opinion or wait for her to bring home a friend who looks suspiciously like Angelina Jolie.
After sitting through several alarming clips of the Brad Pitt movie, it became extremely difficult to work out where our daughter ended and where Benjamin Button began.
By the final credits, I was convinced the show's producers had stopped running film clips and was showing family snaps of our daughter crawling on the living room floor.
Most parents are loath to admit it, but they secretly have no qualms about their offspring sharing more than a passing resemblance to an attractive young child star. A Judy Garland perhaps, or a Jodie Foster, but not a pin-up of the opposite gender playing an 80-year-old man-baby.
Of course, it is all in the genes. When I was an abnormally tall and lanky 10-year-old boy, my mother foolishly allowed my hair to grow in line with the effeminate fashions of new romanticism that inexplicably took hold in the early 1980s.
She had naively hoped that her long, skinny son might somehow disappear behind the hair and the lead singer from Spandau Ballet might take his place.
Instead, I turned into Chewbacca.
Whenever I walked into the living room, my blindly devoted mother said: 'You see, you look like one of those out of Adam And The Ants.'
Whenever I walked into the school playground, my friends said: 'Boy, you said it, Chewie.'
So I have some empathy for my little girl. It is not easy being mistaken for an iconic movie character.
Being mistaken for a different sex, however, is another matter altogether.
A few hours after watching Slumdog Millionaire win its eighth Oscar, we found ourselves sitting in the doctor's waiting room.
Benjamin Button Junior is teething and one particular tooth is pushing through with all the delicacy and gentleness of a pneumatic drill boring holes in concrete.
As we waited for the doctor, I bounced her on my knee to distract her from the pains. An auntie sitting opposite smiled at the both of us and gestured towards our daughter.
'How old is he?' she asked.
How old is he? How old is he? He is an eight-month-old little girl, you daft old bat.
'She is eight months old,' I replied gently, letting the myopic auntie off the hook.
'Oh, he really is lovely,' she continued. 'You must be really proud.'
What am I supposed to be proud of exactly? That I have fathered a child of indiscriminate gender? That I have Benjamin Button sitting on my knee? That under a certain light my daughter looks like a football hooligan?
'Yes, she is rather cute,' I emphasised. 'We are rather lucky. Luckily, she takes after her mother.'
'Ah, he is adorable all right,' the auntie said.
So, she was myopic and hard of hearing. No wonder she was seeing the doctor. Does this woman have any senses left that still work?
The auntie smiled again at my baby who, thanks to teething pains, decided at that particular moment to grab the car keys out of my hand and bite a plastic key-ring in half.
With half a key-ring hanging out of her mouth, my dribbling, snarling daughter half-glared back at her.
My little girl certainly was not doing her femininity any favours.
'He's a feisty little one all right.'
The auntie chuckled. I wanted to chuck her through the window.
'Yes, I suppose so,' I sighed, waving the white flag.
I took a long hard look at my child.
It is certainly true that I never conform to those irritating, outdated stereotypes - blue and soldiers for boys, pink and dollies for girls - but it is not as if she was wearing a West Ham kit and chanting 'there's only one team in London'.
She was dressed in brown trousers and a beige top - cheap, practical clothes for crawling around on the carpet.
It was the lack of hair. Eight months old and she still sports the hairstyle favoured by Mini-Me in Austin Powers.
Once she gets hair, she will stop looking like Brad Pitt's granddad.
The auntie suddenly piped up: 'What's his name?'
'Benjamin,' I replied. 'We named him after his grandmother.'
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
