Whose youthful indiscretions?

For many years, the only pot my girlfriends and I have dealt with was the one in our Calphalon sets.

Then two things happened. We became mothers of teenagers, and some of us got divorced.

Take a bunch of aging former hippie and stoner baby boomers and strip them of marriage, and what you have is an entire population of single 420-friendly men primed to date. And it seems a lot of them live here in Marin.

No matter how you feel about drugs and booze, it does present some interesting dilemmas in our search for a new partner.

One girlfriend was head-over-heels and planning a future with a guy who was more than 420-friendly — he was having a long-term full-blown affair.

I know I have been just as foolish when it comes to love as the next gal, but I have to wonder: After the painful divorces we’ve all gone through, would these be the smartest life-partners to choose?

Are these the kind of men we want to stepdad our kids?

I don’t know how others would handle it, but I would have a tough time telling Trent, my 14-year-old, to stay away from pot while his new stepdad was lighting up in the next room.

Sometimes I feel pretty alone in this. Or maybe, like my parents and their “When I was your age ...” speeches, old.

But something is happening here that wasn’t happening when I was growing up.

Used to be that we hid whatever we were doing, whether we inhaled or not, from our parents; now, Marin parents think it’s better that they supply the pot and booze because “the kids are going to do it anyway, so why not have them do it here, in the safety of our home, where I can watch them?”

While I can appreciate the perhaps-genuine-if-convoluted concern behind that thinking, it is so wrong — even if it weren’t illegal. Want to serve booze to your kid? Want to smoke pot with your kid? OK, but I reserve the right to decide if you serve it to and smoke it with mine. And the answer is no, you can’t.

I see it as just another way Marin parents have micromanaged their children’s lives. Marin kids can’t even experience their own “youthful indiscretions” without having their parents sticking their fingers in it!

It’s the same way parents have taken over kids’ sports. They’ve taken a game that only required a ball, gloves and some bats or a soccer ball and feet and turned it into a managed and coached sport that requires dossiers on each player (and their parents) and player drafts and restraining orders against those parents who can’t respect the rules of the game and personal coaches and way too many parties at Round Table Pizza to hand out gigantic trophies — at the end of a losing season.

I know that this viewpoint doesn’t always make me popular, especially given my own youthful indiscretions.

“You’re a hypocrite,” scolds one friend who occasionally lights up with her older kids.

That may be so, but I don’t care. It was one thing to be on the teenage side of drinking and drugs; it’s another thing to be on the parental side of it. This side isn’t having nearly as much fun with it as the kids are.

And recent studies here (http://10.1.187.19/archives/archive/search/_1168386218/?search[view]=detail&search[focus]=1) show that more Marin ninth-graders are drinking alcohol, getting stoned on pot and binge drinking than in previous years (and Marin kids consistently report higher pot use than the rest of the state). That’s what Trent will be facing next year in high school ... or, as I learned recently, even sooner.

I was about to drop Trent off at a get-together at the home of one of his friends. Everyone was happy about this; he’d be hanging with his buds, and I had a plan to hang with mine. But as we approached the house, I saw a handful of really big boys carrying something that could only be a case of beer.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Mom, chill. It’s OK.”

“Oh really? I don’t think so. The only chill thing going on in this scenario is the case those boys are carrying,” I said as I parked the van. “I’m going to go talk to Dylan’s parents.”

I’m not so sure Trent heard me from the spot on the floor he had scrunched his body into so no one could identify him as the one with the crazy mother.

But as it turns out, I’m not so sure I was the crazy mother. A few minutes into my chat with Dylan’s mom, I could see that a little beer among friends wasn’t too much of a problem to her (although some of the boys had driven themselves to the party — and isn’t that interesting?).

A few minutes before, a few minutes after, and I would not have seen the beer. I would have dropped Trent off, said, “I love you,” and gone off to create my own fun. Timing, as they say, is everything.

I got back into the van, turned around and we headed home.

If you are not a person who believes in hell, trust me, it exists, because that’s what I was in, stuck in a house with a kid filled with so much hatred for a mother who had ruined his evening, his fun, his friendships and most probably, his life. I don’t think I’d ever suffered so much, even during the divorce. There was an oppressiveness in my house that was about as gloomy as the Mordor battle scenes in “The Lord of the Rings.”

It was one of the few times I really missed having a husband around because I was desperate to have someone hold me tight and tell me it was all going to be OK, that I was doing the right thing, that this wasn’t going to be the turning point in Trent’s life, changing a relatively decent and polite boy into a pierced and tattooed addict strung-out on the Tenderloin’s mean streets.

The next morning, we had somehow made it from hell back to Earth, albeit a bit bedraggled.

Then, of course, it was time for The Talk.

He listened, with a mere smattering of eye-rolls, as I tried hard not to turn The Talk into The Lecture.

“But Mom,” Trent protested, “didn’t you ever drink beer as a kid?”

Not much, actually, although I was thankful he didn’t ask me about tequila, gin or Boone’s Farm.

The truth is, I had done a lot of really stupid things as a teenager despite being a “good” kid and an A student. Sometimes, I think it was just plain luck that I survived. A lot of my friends feel the same way about their own teen years.

I know Trent’s going to experiment. I know he’s going to stumble, fall, push the limits, rebel, mess up and struggle. I want Trent to know that I’m going to be there to love and support him.

I’m just not going to supply him.