Baby B

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe dubbed me “The First Internet Baby.”

My birth was the most live-streamed event of the last decade.

My high school valedictorian speech landed me the title of “Time’s Most Influential Person of the Year,” days before my 18th birthday.

Strangers know more about my life than I know myself.

It’s culturally agreed that I am the first human whose life has been consistently and constantly documented in all of known history.

And it’s all because of Marta and Ben Barnum.

* * *

Marta and Ben documented every second of their lives together. Their wry wit and kitschy staged photos made them social media darlings—the awkward, relatable couple to bored spouses across the country.

When Marta struggled with infertility and documented her IVF journey, Ben filmed every doctor’s appointment.

Ben once told me that they knew—at embryo selection—that I was going to be someone special.

“Our baby,” he had said. “Our baby BB.”

I had a social media presence before I even had a presence of mind.

* * * * *

The screen is blurry and the speakers blast a loud, plasticky clank. The camera is handed off clumsily to a bystander—likely a nursing assistant. A monitor is aglow in front of them, showing wiggly zygotes in Petri dishes, magnified to thousands of times their actual size.

Marta lifts a carefully manicured finger—#ad #promo #pr—and taps the third dish from the left. “This one is a girl, right?”

“Yes,” the doctor replies out of frame.

“That’s our BB. Our Baby Beatrice.”

Ben hugs Marta tightly as tears stream down his face.

* * * * *

Ben and Marta created a blog and called it “Family Circus,” a play on their surname and the Bil Keane comic strip. They used their blog to chronicle every aspect of their family’s lives. Of their lives. Of their daughter’s life.

Of my life.

* * *

You may know me as BB. Baby B. @babybbbarnum. I’m Beatrice Barnum, and my life is an open book. I’ve never known anything else.

First period? Publicized. Immediate post on the family blog. SnapChats of my ranging emotions. Starring in Tampax ads before I had even opened a box of my own.

First kiss? Live-streamed. Without my knowledge. I accidentally cut Joey Thomas’s lips with my braces, and cursed my parents for forcing me to get metal braces because it would bring “a nostalgic appeal to our audience” that invisible dental aligners couldn’t provide. 100 million people watched my embarrassment in real time.

First dance? Photographed from preparation to execution. Hollywood designers begged to dress me for the occasion. I was barely twelve years old.

* * *

I once asked Marta why we had to document everything for the world to see.

“There are a lot of lonely people in this world, BB,” she said. “A lot of people think they’re the only ones who feel a certain way, or have experienced certain things. When we’re so open, these people feel less alone.”

“Less alone,” I repeated flatly.

“Absolutely.” She grinned. “Now lean in for this selfie.”

I craned neck and smiled widely, my eyes empty.

“Cheese!”

* * *

I think Grammy was the only person who could see the truth.

She’d constantly pick fights with Marta and Ben, telling them that the way that they were raising me was barbaric.

“I didn’t raise you to be a exhibitionist, Benjamin!”

“Don’t question my parenting skills, Linda!”

“Times have changed, Mom. It’s not like it was when I was a kid.”

These arguments would push our views to the billions, but Grammy didn’t care about that. She worried about me. She cared about me.

* * *

When I was 15, Grammy gave me a locket.

“Beatrice, dear,” she said, sitting strategically behind the large decorative fern in the living room. “This is my most prized earthly possession.”

The locket was heavy and shaped like a rounded heart. It smelled metallic, like a brassy instrument. The etching on its front was worn down to illegibility.

Grammy’s face was hidden by the fern, but her voice was still picked up by the microphones in the walls.

“You can only open this once,” she said, “so only open it when you absolutely need to. When you need it more than anything.”

The locket glinted in the light, most certainly caught by a camera. At least.

“Need what, though?” I asked.

“You’ll know.”

I wasn’t expecting this thoughtful, albeit cryptic, gift to stick to my life, like a running gag in a television sitcom. I spent the next decade of my life inundated by comments regarding the locket.

Do you really not know what’s inside the locket?

It looks like you’re having a bad day. Maybe you should try that locket now?

Sry Cameron broke up w/ u again. Wanna open dat locket?

I couldn’t imagine a moment I’d want to open the locket because I knew it wouldn’t be a moment alone.

* * * * *

“BB’s home from Greece!” Ben exclaims.

Beatrice bumbles through the front door, carrying two large purple suitcases. She is sunburned.

“Dad, put the camera down,” she says. “I’m tired.”

“Tell us all about Greece,” Marta interjects. The back of her sweater is aptly branded with a large logo.

“It was—”

The screen goes black.

* * * * *

I experienced peace once in my life. It lasted two hours.

Just as I returned from a trip to Greece—at the age of 19, tweeting my first impressions under an agreement with an international travel agency—the power went out.

My parents’ house was plunged into darkness, cutting the video of my stateside return to a few short minutes. Our generator didn’t kick on. We had to call a repairman.

In the first hour, I sat alone in the bathroom, eyes closed, enjoying the silence and the scent of clean towels. There were no voices reminding me of an imminent media appearance. No frantic knocks asking if I was having “gastrointestinal issues.” Nothing.

The second hour, I laid on the cool hardwood floor of the dining room, smiling. Marta angrily asked if I was on drugs—in a tone I had never heard from her before. It shook me out of my moment, and the power returned shortly thereafter.

(After posing for a selfie with Ben, the mechanic’s clientele nearly tripled.)

* * *

When Grammy died, I hated that I had to share my grief.

I hated even more that, as my feelings were broadcast across the World Wide Web, my pages were flooded with comments.

So #relatable. Losing someone is the worst.

Sending love from Philly! <3

Praying for you!

#ripgrammy

Marta and Ben refused to let me disable comments. They said they “didn’t understand my avoidance of sympathy.”

I didn’t want anyone else to understand. I didn’t want anyone else to understand anything. I didn’t want anyone to be thinking of me. Or observing my pain through the glass of a screen.

I just wanted to be me. As me. With only me.

Even if I didn’t know who that was.

* * *

It was an international scandal when I declined the marriage proposal from my boyfriend of four years. There were polls on celebrity gossip sites asking if I had made the right decision. (19% Yes, 77% No, 4% Undecided.) There were articles with headlines like “Baby BB and Xander: The Relationship Timeline,” “From B to X: The End of an Era,” and “BB and Xander: Where it Went Wrong.”

I was tabloid fodder.

I almost opened the locket then. Almost.

* * * * *

Beatrice Barnum scuffles out of a grocery store. She holds a canvas tote with her left hand and is pulling a hat down over her head with her right hand.

“Beatrice!” a voice off-camera yells. “Why did you end it with Xander? Is it true he has a gambling problem?”

Beatrice removes her hand from her hat and then clutches a heart-shaped locket.

“No comment,” she says.

* * * * *

Even though I’ve been living on my own, I’m not really on my own.

Ben and Marta are a block away from me, in the fancy McMansion that housed my childhood.

My house was built with microphones in my walls. All the lights are motion-sensitive. Cameras are recording 24/7, with two sets of backup generators hooked up in case of electrical failure. (Can’t keep the viewers waiting, now can we?) The whole ordeal was part of a sponsorship contract with a large electrics corporation. I can’t even sneak around the halls in my own home.

* * *

I think that the most glass-shattering thing about my glass-shattering moment is that it wasn’t really glass-shattering at all.

There was no big magazine feature. No misquoted news article. No major life event. The day was average, as far as a day in the life of Beatrice Barnum could be. (I was the daughter of “Family Circus” fame, after all.)

One day, I just sat down at the foot of my bed. The springs creaked, and I heard the whoosh of the cameras turning to face the source of the sound. And I thought, Now is as good a time as any, huh?

I was fed up with the facade. The charade. The hopelessness.

The unknown was more appealing than the known. Heck, anything was more appealing than the unknown! So I untucked the locket from beneath my sweater, cupped it close to my heart, and closed my eyes.

Inhale. Exhale.

I twisted the lock. It clicked quietly.

And—knowing my audience was anxiously watching this moment, their anticipation trending on Twitter—I opened the locket.

* * * * *

Beatrice Barnum walks slowly into her bedroom. She sits on the end of her bed and it creaks under her weight.

She closes her eyes and tilts her head skyward. She is clutching her locket.

After a breath, Beatrice opens her eyes and twists the clasp of the locket. The camera zooms in, focusing solely on the locket in Beatrice’s grasp. It springs open.

The screen goes black.