It was interesting to see my son’s reaction to a pheasant I had shot.  There it was: a fully-feathered, colorful bird, wrapped in an orange Hy-Vee plastic bag.  My son, who has seen animals only in the context of dog parks and zoos, literally took several steps back.  He wasn’t recoiling in horror so much as discomfort with something totally alien.  After I made a joke and started laughing, he reluctantly took a feather offered to him.

Admittedly, I’m not sure how to teach my son about hunting.  I believe it is a perfectly acceptable form of entertainment.  I also believe that hunting, if not taught properly, can promote a cult of violence.  How, in a world where hunting isn’t necessary for survival, does a father teach his son to enjoy the sport without justifying it through bloodlust?

Vince Vaughn, one of America’s most outstanding bachelors, announced this month that is tying the knot with Canadian real estate agent Kyla Webber.  It seems that Vaughn’s movie, Couples Retreat, may have been therapeutic.  What happened to the lovable party animal from Swingers?  What will become of the Frat Pack? 

Interestingly, he told Oprah.com that he decided to get married not in order to find greater fulfillment, but to have kids.  He is actually sprinting towards responsibility.  He isn’t letting out many details about his relationship, but seems excited mostly excited about the new possibilities of a responsible life. 

On the other side, he has expressed ambivalence about whether the relationship is going to change him.  Good luck on that. 

The anthropological observation of importance here is that many men in America today are experiencing a mid-life crisis.  In contradistinction from a generation ago, however, these men are making moves towards resposibility, not irresponsibility.  Men today get married and have a child, where the boomer escapees were running from their wives and kids.  The midlife crisis today is not a new adolescence.  It is the late departure from it.

The political right – as in Kay S. Hymowitz’s recent article - continues the drumbeat for earlier marriages.  Certainly a wife and child and mortgage will force men to grow up.  Maybe.  But in a world where marriages are dissolvable as aspirin tablets, will this really do this trick?  Besides, men like Vaughn are going into marriage these days with the caveat that they don’t have to change their immature ways.  The a-woman-will-whip-me-into-shape days are over.  Which is why bearing children has become the real test of maturity.  Offspring are so, well, concrete.

In the end, maybe the only weapon the cause of maturity can wield is the promise of a better life.  Being a man is better than being a boy.  Attending a city council meeting is better than watching Southpark.  Wooing a woman is far superior to beating off to Maxim magazine.  Raising a child is more satisfying than being one.  If Vince Vaughn can come to that realization, why not others?

It is striking sometimes just how rarely fathers show up in family pictures.  The obvious reason for this is that fathers are most often the ones shooting the pictures, not the ones in them.  I ask myself, why is this?  Because men are more comfortable and competent with technology?  Because there is something particularly masculine about photography?  This doesn’t seem to be a good enough avenue. 

I was recently told about a psychologist who does family photo therapy.  He has his clients bring in old albums and interpret the pictures.  In this activity the expressions on people’s faces matter, and their poses.   It also matters who is in the snapshot and who isn’t.  Dad usually can’t be seen, and can’t be seen in a double way.  He is not in the static image, and even back then, when it was taken, you couldn’t see his face anyway.  It was covered by a Minolta.

A John Mayer song calls us to a important thought: 

     Didn’t have a camera by my side this time
     Hoping I would see the world through both my eyes 

How strange to think that our attempts to capture the world can take us out of it so much!  When fathers pick up the camera too often they risk missing the very engagement that sees life as something animated and kinetic – and something that involves them as subjects.

On the flip side, how wonderful a thing it can be that fathers perceive and document the family history as they do.  Being behind the camera can be, in some way, like the partially-visible mother in the kitchen throughout Thanksgiving Day.   There is a sense of gift in all of this.  With a camera in hand, there is also a sense of fatherly contemplation.  Not only have I myself experienced this, but I remember a few years ago seeing one of my uncles circling the room at a family reunion.  He simply walked around the perimeter of the room as his children played a game on the area rug.  With obvious enjoyment he noted the conversations and jokes and quirks of the children in their sibling drama.  He wasn’t restless or disengaged at all.  On the contrary, he was brooding in the most beautiful way a father can.

In a rare and perhaps significant case in Toronto this month, a father was awarded full custody of his three daughters on the basis of “alienation” techniques used by the mother.  Justice Kaye McWatt of the Superior Court of Justice decided that the mother, a foot doctor, had “consistently and overwhelmingly” thwarted her ex-husband’s attempts to maintain a relationship with his daughters over the course of several years.  She had, for instance, hung up the phone on him when he called to say goodnight, or slammed the door in his face when he tried to pick the girls up for court-permitted visitation.  On the basis of professional testimony about ”parental alienation syndrome” Judge McWatt made the unusual move of inverting the custody rights.

I doubt this will set a definitive precedent for other courts to follow.  While this case seemed more clear-cut, how is one supposed to distinguish between common (and ubiquitous) alienating language which ex’s use in front of their children and an actual “syndrome”?  And aren’t there plenty of cases in which mothers are protecting from parental irregularities and abuses from the father?

That being said, I’m happy that fathers are beginning to see some hope in the court system.  Men’s rights groups have been crying foul on this very point for decades, that fathers are systematically discriminated against in custody cases and that mothers are able to get away with court violations with almost no repercussions.  If one admits that there is a de facto hole in women’s economic and political rights, then one must grant the same about men when it comes to de jure rights in the home.  The domestic sphere still belongs to the woman in the public mind, and this results in greater clout for mothers in court battles.  There are exceptions, as this case shows.  Though isn’t it telling that the father, a vascular surgeon, managed to win the case only after a lengthy and expensive court battle?

Maybe attitudes are changing, even as the alienation is passed around liberally.  The Greeks had Chronos and Rhea.  We have Kevin Federline and Britney Spears.  Anyone else feel a little queasy?