Explication of "My Son the Man"

Sharon Olds’ “My Son the Man,” is the poetic narrative of a parent watching the maturation of his or her son. The narrator talks about the growth of their son as being like “the way Houdini would expand his body while people were putting him in chains.” This allusion to the famous escape artist implies that the boy is escaping from childhood and the placement of chains is akin to parental attachments holding him back. The speaker recalls a time when the child was very young and they could dress him in his pajamas and easily pick him up. As children become adults they no longer require the constant help of their guardians, and Olds evokes this with the image of the dressing and playing because as her boy grows, as previously mentioned, she can no longer do these things with him. Olds’ character recognizes this change in the line “I cannot imagine him no longer a child, and I know I must get ready, get over my fear of men now my son is going to be one.” This speaker watches their child grow and fears the time when adulthood will take him away from them but in stating “I know I must get ready, get over my fear,” they recognize the necessity of accepting this determined fate. 

The Houdini allusion is again utilized in the final 10 lines when the narrator claims “This was not what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson, snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains, and appeared in my arms.” The emergence of Houdini from his Hudson river escape is compared to the birth of this boy. The closing line tells of the relationship the two share and the way the boy views his growing older. Olds writes “Now he looks at me the way Houdini studied a box to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled,” and claims that the son character see his parent as chains that hold him back and he has expectations to escape them soon. The boy, like Houdini, will “[smile] and let himself be manacled,” and thus he is happy to be bound by his parent’s chains.