1990 - 1992
In August of 1989 a new attorney came to town. This was in the midst of LA Law-mania and, I kid you not, Arturo was almost a Jimmy Smits/Victor Sifuentes clone. Except for he had a little bit of Barack Obama thrown in too since his father was part African American. I was assigned to Arturo's cases and loved every minute. I was still sorta with Bill but the lack of commitment issue was bugging me. I wanted to marry and have a baby and if marriage wouldn't happen, a baby was certainly going to, if I had anything to say about it. When I announced I was going off the pill, a fight ensued...again, much more to the story but this is what led me to believe whatever kind of relationship we had, it needed to be over. I really thought Arturo was completely out of my league. Not so much because of his being an attorney but because of who he was; how he carried himself, etc. Bill was also very smart, not bad looking and had a high paying job but was still always very down to earth. Arturo looked like he stepped out of GQ magazine.
Well, proximity breeds fondness; sometimes. We occasionally had lunch together and discussed stuff. Including, of course, my relationship with Bill which he never, ever understood. In 1990 he propsed that we attend a conference in San Diego together. There he wined and dined me and of course, we became intimate. We continued dating when we returned and we began a fairly 'normal' relationship. He was single, about my age and certainly wasn't ruling out marriage/kids down the road. By the end of 1990, I was certainly on the fast-track toward engagement and happily so. Except, I was still seeing Bill. Even after I told Arturo it was over, it was pretty hard to shake someone I had been with for 6 + years, essentially had 2 children with and who had been instrumental in creating in me self-confidence, social skills and self-esteem that I only dreamed about earlier. Bill, on the other hand, did know about Arturo and it almost destroyed me when he said I needed to pursue what would give me the most happiness (or some similar sh*t) and thus, I had to stay around out of comfort, convenience and who knows what else.
I did go off the pill in October. Both Bill and Arturo knew and the very few times Bill and I were together we used protection, except when we were in Florida on our last vacation. . a vacation we both knew was our goodbye vacation.
Because I was wanting to get pregnant, I had my cycle pretty well mapped out and can tell you the night I think it happened. . . but come January, when it was confirmed, instead of being ecstatic, I was ecstatic and kept wondering 'what if' this baby isn't Arturo's. I knew he would be furious and end the marriage we were planning in April. I also knew that it would be pretty apparent, if not at birth, soon after, who exactly this baby belonged to. Bill like Arturo, had dark, curly hair BUT, not the beautiful light brown complexion of a Tiger Woods, for example.
Art and I married, eloped, actually as I felt I was beyond wanting a big wedding. Plus, I didn't want to walk down the hometown church aisle with a bulge . . .as this still would be a big deal back there. We purchased a new, cute little town home and into married life. Shortly after this, Bill and the girls moved to just outside of Salt Lake City, UT. Other than the worries that just maaaaybe, I was wrong about when I ovulated, life was good. People we worked with were so excited about the baby and I was inundated with showers. Art and I took several trips just before the baby was due as we knew we'd have less of a chance once it came. One of the trips was to San Antonio, where his family lived and lo and behold, that is where our baby girl chose to make her 2 week early entrance to the world. We lucklily found a wonderful nurse-midwife and the labor and delivery was truly less traumatic than I thought it would be. Payten was (and is) a beautiful baby, even that early. Having Art's family there made me feel better about her parentage because they all agreed, she looked just like him in his baby pictures. She had dark, straight hair and skin as light as mine BUT, she had dark crescents underneath her fingernails which, everyone assured me, would be her skin color as she aged. As time went by, it indeed was obvious that Art was her daddy. So life should have stayed good.
Silly me, I thought that if the baby was his, Art would be the same kind of dad Bill had been to his own girls. Not quite so. Coming from a fairly traditional Latin family, childcare was expected to be my arena and mine pretty much alone except for showing up at photo-ops and occasionally venturing someplace to show friends his beautiful daughter. Payten was colicky and didn't sleep through the night until she was 7 months old. I was bored at home with her so returned to work after only 4 weeks (I've never judged Angelina for calling Shiloh a blob because to those of us who aren't baby people, newborns really are kinda blobs). Before it was easy to work together as well as be married but after Payten, this became difficult. We brought work stuff home and vice versa. In Art's defense, we should have discussed parenting expectations long before Payten's arrival because I had an absolutely unrealistic idea of how most men parent their babies and he had just as unrealistic an idea of how hard it was for working women, in the 90's to shoulder the whole load. In many ways, I wish I had entered into this relationship later in my life as Art had many, many good qualities but he essentially was a rebound relationship for me and constantly being compared to someone he couldn't stand and we had a different vision of what our family should look like. I filed for divorce in the summer of 1992 and for the first time in my adult life, I really was on my own. Payten and I settled into a house I purchased in an older part of town and began building our life. Art, following the tradition of my exes, left when she was just over a year, to return to San Antonio.
