If Betty could see this now

Does anyone besides me remember reading Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique"? In the book, she describes women in the 1950s who had this feeling of restlessness, wanting something more but not knowing what it was. Some of them, established in a marriage and family, didn't know what to do so they had another baby. It wasn't quite what they were looking for, Friedan concluded, but it was what they knew.

I thought we'd come a longer way than that. But recently in New Jersey, a 60-year-old woman, Frieda Birnbaum, had twins.

What was she thinking?

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. It's not like she had to answer a problem with no name. She's a psychologist. And she's not one of those women who longed to have a child but never did. She's got three. A son, 33, a daughter 29, and another son, 6.

To be honest, I wonder why she had the 6-year-old at an age when most women become grandmothers.

Birnbaum told Fox News she wanted her younger son to have siblings closer to his age and wanted to remove some of the stigma attached to older women giving birth. Stigma? I speak for the women who welcomed menopause; stigma my Aunt Fanny! It's time to find other things to do in the so-called golden years.

What about her older two kids? Do they want siblings so far from their own age?

And I can just hear the 6-year-old now. "Twins? Ah, gee Mom. I wanted a puppy. What am going to do with twins?"

What is SHE going to do with twins? Babies are hard work. When they start school, she'll be 66, if she survives their terrible twos. She and her husband of 38 years won't be around for their high school graduations most likely. Who's going to put those kids through college?

Who's going to teach them to drive when they're 16? Who's going to wait up all night for them to come home from their first date? At 60, she needs more naps than they do. When they need to be driven from school to activity to sport to the mall to heaven knows where else, will she still have an unrestricted driver's license? How will she remember when to pick them up from soccer practice, or where the soccer field is? We get forgetful as the years pile on.

She's 60 years old and facing years of changing diapers, cleaning up baby barf, getting up in the middle of the night with ear infections, tantrums, ad nauseum — times two.

Betty Friedan is spinning in her grave.