If you overlook (which everyone seems to) the asinine philandering of husband Donald, Betty Draper's got it pretty good – what with her former-model looks; decadent days of gossip, equestrianism, chain-smoking and red wine; hams that come out of the oven perfectly pineappled for dinner (which you never see her eat, let alone cook); and, last but far from least, those magically invisible children.

It's the magically invisible children that really intrigue me, and piss me off. As stay-at-home mother, Betty is more of a stay-at-home blob, albeit a skinny one, and I would resent her if she didn't seem so bored. Those kids (a boy and a girl whose names are negligible) are generally nowhere to be found, silent lumps in front of the big wood-framed TV, a brief blur running by with plastic laundry bags over their heads (no matter), or dutifully fixing incredibly stiff Bloody Marys for the grown-ups (just a splash of the bloody, please). Where does one find – and then erase – such children?

Granted, I'm all fired up about the strangeness of fiction, this Mad Men TV series that my husband and I were slow to catch onto but now we're hooked, one season behind by way of DVD (so my apologies if I'm not up to date on what might have transpired differently in the latest episodes).

It's fiction and it's the '60s and this woman and I have about as much in common as myself and a good old fashioned Martian. I did notice early on though that the setting of Betty Draper's domestic oblivion is Ossining: Donald rides the Metro-North Hudson line at whatever ungodly hour he decides to return home from the big city (if he does return home); neighbors worry about prison breaks from Sing Sing. Betty and I are kindred spirits, at least geographically speaking (minus the prison), and there's more truth to this TV world than I'd like to admit.

We both live within this "Westchester" rubric, a county whose very name used to conjure up in my mind just this sort of woman, along with high taxes, rare dogs and stone walls. Now that I live here, I know this brand of housewife is not an altogether dead breed. I see the sparkle of oversized diamond rings and the coifed hair and fine-tuned make-up of some moms around town. There's a secret, I think, to their glossy sheen: they get help. The missing link between Betty and her invisible children is her equally invisible black nanny. Plus, her kids are old enough to be in school so there's a good amount of hours to kill in the day. And kill them Betty does.

Second only to riding horses, Betty's hobby is beautification. You'd think her husband leaves her no choice but worry about her looks, as it's hard to keep his attention with so many other city slickers at his disposal. Or that at any moment, the catty neighbor gossip Betty dabbles in could turn and bite her in the butt, if say, she let her lipstick smear her teeth. But you can't really blame exterior forces for the superficiality of Betty, since her perfection-quest seems to be something she's incorporated into her being long before we met her.

When I get a brief glimpse of these children – so lonely they seem, so untalked to – I often wonder what will become of them, what kind of adults they will grow into, what sort of vices they'll turn to when they don't turn out perfect. They are, after all, representations of people who might have become our very parents. These kids (most of our parents) must suffer from a great sense of isolation, abandonment, sadness. Or maybe I'm reading too much into this.

I also searched the movie Revolutionary Road (similar to Mad Men in many regards) for its missing kids. These children were really, really absent. But, as my husband pointed out, this invisibility was probably a move on the part of the screenwriters to make room for the real meat of the story, namely the brutal battles the parents needed to have. Luckily, this movie is set along another Metro-North line, in the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut. Not in my backyard.