By Karen Wheeler, Slice of Life

Help! I’m wandering about in the information desert! It’s a mom’s worst nightmare, trudging across these arid dunes hoping for the tiniest drop of data to slake my thirst. The reason I’m here?

It’s a boy thing.

“Geez, Mom,” my sons complain. “Big deal if the fire alarm went off during third period. Why do you want to know about that? And who cares what we had for lunch?”

“I care,” I say, but my mouth is parched and my lips are dry so the words come out all weak and weary. I tell myself the boys mean no harm, but still the dearth of conversation hits me hard.

Never has this been more apparent than in the past few weeks. My son asked a girl to the homecoming dance, but never shared any information about the details of the upcoming event. Desperate, I went to visit a friend with a talkative son.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” I asked. My friend, aware of how blessed she was to live in an oasis of teenage dialogue, took pity on me scrimping by on the dry, barren sands of silence.

“Don’t you know?” she replied. “Pictures are at your house at 4 p.m.”

“Wow,” I said. “And what about flowers, restaurants, or the like? My son hasn’t said a word about any of that.”

My friend handed me a sheet. “Here is the reservation information for dinner. Your son’s date is all set to go for flowers, but they still need to go shopping for a tie.” She leaned in closer and laughed. “By the way, ask him about that little incident at the movie theater on Friday night.”

I know. I should have seen this conversation drought coming a long time ago. After all, my husband’s idea of being chatty is to tell me the score of the Twins game. Still, I had hoped my boys would escape their genetic destiny and learn to quench my thirst for little details about their lives.

In lieu of actual dialogue, however, I have learned to glean information where I can but always, always, remain surreptitious for a source revealed is a source removed. Thus, I never mention names for fear the word will get back to my sons’ talkative friends - the ones that flood their mothers with information, whereupon some of it will then trickle its way out to me here in the dunes.

“How was the movie Friday night?” I leaned nonchalantly against the counter, trying to look like a mom who had other things on her mind.

“Good,” my son replied.

I tried again. “Anything exciting happen?”

“Not really.” My son looked at me curiously. “Why?”

Here is where it gets tricky. “Oh, I thought I overheard someone talking about something that happened at the movie.”

“Well, there was this one thing,” he said, “but it really wasn’t all that exciting,” and then he walked away. Without giving me even a DROP more of information! I crawled over to the telephone and called my daughter.

I could hear laughing college students in the background but I was desperate to dip my bucket into a well that actually had some water in it. “Talk to me!” I hollered into the phone. “Tell me something. Anything!”

My daughter had lived long enough with her father and brothers to know exactly where I was coming from, so she obliged. I learned her calculus teacher had a Russian accent. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend. People from her dorm floor had gone out for free ice cream the night before. Conversation flowed in a smooth give and take and I was satisfied. My thirst was quenched. I was now equipped to travel a few more miles across the desert.

My friends have suggested fighting sand with sand -- to reduce all conversation in the home to a series of “yups” and grunts. Others have recommended climbing onto my high camel and throwing down huge handfuls of sensitivity and respect when it comes to verbal family interactions. But I suspect it all boils down to something my daughter and I figured out years ago.

“Mom, it’s a boy thing.”

Thus, I fill my conversation canteen when I can. At work. Girls night out. Phone calls with female friends and relatives. Yet I won’t totally give up on my boys, continuing to try and squeeze out a few dribbles of conversation when I can.

“Mom, why are you holding that Y-shaped stick over me? Is that supposed to be a divining rod or something? Have you totally lost it?”

Wish me luck finding water here in the information desert. 

(Karen Wheeler is a veterinarian who lives in Burnsville. Her column is one of several opinion and commentary pieces appearing regularly in this newspaper.)