I never stop being surprised at the power of embarrassment. Or maybe I should say, the power of family, to cause it.

I remember my toddler son, at lunch with me and my friend in a very kosher deli in Great Neck, demanding loudly for a piece of “special ham.” When folks at nearby tables turned around to see who was making such a request, in a kosher deli no less, I shrugged and explained “it’s his name for corned beef.”

I thought that had taken care of things until the friend with me said, “So, ham is such a commonplace thing in your house, and corned beef such a rarity, that to get him to eat corned beef, you call it ham?”

“Time to head back to the car!” I said brightly.

Embarrassment becomes turbo-charged when your children become teens, reaching an apex with the classic junior-year-of-high-school college campus visits.

I was allowed to accompany my own progeny only if I obeyed the rules: No eye contact. No speaking. If anyone on the tour could guess whose parent I was, I must leave the tour.

Of course, any other parent could have divined our relatedness in an instant: my child was the one at the geometrically provable farthest point from me in the group.

I was especially glad he was out of earshot when I slipped on some late-winter ice and fell ignominiously into a late-winter drift of snow. I was able to scramble back to my feet before anyone saw — especially not him, away at the front of the group. Thank goodness, the only person I’d embarrassed was myself.

My personal Hall of Shame includes at least one other notable incident.

My kindergartener’s class was making their biggest field trip of the year to Westbury Gardens, and I had lost the lottery for being the mom who would accompany them on that trip.

But I had a bigger concern. This child had just recovered from a bout of croup (breathing with such difficulty it can sound like whooping cough) two nights before — out of the blue — and I had not fully recovered myself from the experience of rushing him, through the night air with every car window rolled down, to the Emergency Room. After examination, a dose of steroids, and a wait to make sure they took effect, the doctors sent us home.

This was his first day back at school, but I was still nervous about him, so I asked the teacher for permission to accompany the trip. Just to make sure he was okay.

What happened next was that the teacher called for the assistant principal to come talk to me.

Unbeknownst to me, this was the most inflammatory request I could have made. At least one other mom had just been turned away for wanting the same thing: How could they agree to let me join the trip?

“But I just want to be there so I can peel off with him to the hospital if he has another episode; you certainly wouldn’t be able to take him there in the school bus,” I protested.

“That’s true,” the A.P. replied. “Tell me this,” she said, and came closer till she was nose-to-nose with me. “Promise me you won’t do anything foolish, like follow the school bus all the the way to the Gardens.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was saying DON’T do this, or in a fingers-crossed kind of way, Do EXACTLY this. Either way, I said, “I-I promise?” and she seemed satisfied.

So I followed the bus in my car — but at enough of a distance that I got lost anyway.

Finally I caught up with the kids, on their tour of the house. But I had sworn to the teacher that I would have all possible medications on me, in case my child needed anything. They were all in a back-pack that my husband had converted to being our Safety First go-bag.

The bag was sufficiently bulky that, when turning around, I almost knocked into some priceless porcelain heirlooms in the drawing room. But at least I was prepared for any emergency.

My child’s croup did not recur. But at the end of the trip, on the way back through the parking lot to where the bus was parked, another child tripped and skinned their knee. “Oh! I’ve got it covered!” I shouted, and rushed over to them with my enormous backpack…only to find that, for some reason, there didn’t seem to be any such thing as a band-aid, anywhere in the bag. I had tagged along, and almost caused a catastrophe, only to be completely useless.

That was enough embarrassment to last me … well, to last me until that child wanted to look at colleges.