See, this is why I wouldn’t do it. I have terrible judgement and, for all her faults my missus would be certain to catch the peculiar birthmark and divine its meaning within seconds. If I ever noticed it, on the other hand, I’d have assumed it was a production number or something and just let it go.
This whole “It would devastate her to know the truth” is pretty much bull. My sister and my mother both had sets of twins that died shortly after birth. It was terribly, terribly hard, but they recovered. Assuming that your spoouse isn’t strong enough to handle something denigrates the spouse, IMHO. People are stronger than you think, and often as strong as they have to be.
StG
Plus, aren’t there times when you’re supposed to be devastated? When your child dies, for example, you’re supposed to feel pain and grief. I guess it does get to me a little bit that the fact that the child existed was glossed over in favor of adopting a new child. Gregory Peck’s character did know that the first child had died, but it just seems wrong that this child wasn’t grieved over, really. Life just went on. He was replaced. The more I think about it, the more it feels less like keeping a secret from your other half to protect her and more like rewriting history. “Our first child was a stillbirth so we adopted a child whose mother died in childbirth” becomes “We never lost our child.”