It's humbling enough to admit I'm looking for love on Match.com. It's exponentially more embarrassing to admit my mother is doing the same thing.

No disrespect to the woman who gave me life, but what child of any age would not develop severe nausea at the thought of being in the same dating pool as her parent?

Before this disturbing turn of events, my mother spent her hours on the Internet settled in front of the computer with a bowl of Count Chocula, dishing with her deranged pals in the official Beanie Baby chat room or buying limited-edition Furbies on eBay.

I used the Web primarily to stalk ex-boyfriends and find out what sweet young man J.Lo is currently corrupting.

I didn't think my mom's Internet interests and mine would ever coincide, much less collide in such desperate fashion in the same online dating service.

After all, I'm a 27-year-old writer living in New York who spends most of her time in bars. Mom is a 57-year-old court clerk in San Diego who spends most of her spare time dusting her collection of ceramic squirrels, badgers and bunny rabbits.

I had just joined the realm of the digitally desperate on Match.com when I sprang the news on Mom, expecting to hear something very mom-like in return.

Her response: "Oh, I've been on that for about a month. Just a bunch of losers."

I should have been impressed by Mom's Internet savvy, but I was resentful. This is my turf! My technology! But then I realized that wasn't true. As more and more lonely hearts lean on the Internet for intimacy, digital dating has certainly lost its stigma, for people of all ages.

Match.com, the service we use and the largest of its kind, claims 653,000 paying customers and has 5 million profiles posted. The company's stats show 10 percent of them were born before the Eisenhower administration.

Altogether, more than 27 million Americans visited matchmaking sites in October, according ComScore Media Metrix, a company that gets paid to measure this kind of stuff. And 22 percent of them were 50 or older.

So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that online matchmaking is a family affair - at least in my freaky family. When I was a blossoming young woman, Mom and I never had those giddy, girl-to-girl exchanges or heart-felt, advice-filled sessions on the topic of my beaus. Maybe this was the signal to connect with my mother as a gal-pal and to treasure the moment.

Or maybe I should hurl my iBook out the window and run screaming to a Web-free convent where I'll never have to confront the image of my mother pitching herself in cyberspace again.

But that wouldn't be fair to my computer. I can't blame the messenger. And I can't really blame Mom, either.

She's always been comfortable playing the dating service game. During her non-married periods, she enthusiastically posted and answered newspaper personals and joined countless dating services.

If she wasn't always lucky, at least she was always in the game: married twice with two kids. My longest relationship, on the other hand, lasted two months and I have two cats. To quote Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny: "My biological clock is ticking like a time bomb."

Now she's better at this than I am. I don't even have a photo posted with my online dating profile. I could call that a feminist statement, but the truth is that I'm lazy and I look fat in all the pictures I have. Mom, on the other hand, effortlessly posted a picture. How did she figure out a scanner?

Regardless of how we reached this disturbing point, from now on I'd have access to images and information about my mom's potential matches and vice versa. All the most disgusting scenarios.

It's not like we're psychotic sorority sisters vying for the same guy. Having recovered from my Electra complex years ago, I made 35 the high-end of my date-match age range. Thirty-five is way too young for Mom - or at least I pray it is.

But we're not the only factors here. What about the men out there? What if some guy chose both of us? Gross.

It's within her rights to take advantage of Match.com, and it's just as much within my rights to steer as clear of her online love life as I can. But no such luck.

Ring!

Me: Hello?

Mom: The hottest guy just e-mailed me. He looks like Huey Lewis. Do you know who Huey Lewis is?

Me: Yes.

Mom: Look him up.

Me: Who, Huey Lewis?

Mom: No! Look up the guy!

Me: No.

Mom: I'm your mother!

Me: Don't remind me.

Mom: Could you do me this one little favor?

Me: Fine, if you'll stop calling me!!!!

When she insists, I don't have much choice. I took a deep breath and found lover boy's profile. When the pixels settled, I practically passed out. There he was: Mom's dream man, with a corny cowboy hat atop a Huey-like head with long locks flowing underneath.

Even more distressing was his resemblance to Mom's second husband, who played the ponies, ranted that feminists were taking over the world, and once lived in his car in a family-fitness-center parking lot.

I wondered why Mom would want his identical twin. Obviously, her taste for long-haired losers had not evolved - only her methods of mining them. And then a morbid sense of curiosity led me to her profile, where the trauma continued.

As every Match.com member knows, you must fill out a profile form and write a couple paragraphs about who you are and what you're looking for in a mate. You must also choose an ID name and a snappy quote to get your amour's attention.

Mom's Match.moniker is her cat's name morphed with hers, which winds up sounding like a bizarre mix of porn star and children's performer. And her pickup line is an equally bizarre invite to meet her at the Disney Store.

She was equally horrified by the grammar in my online profile, but not nearly as horrified as I was to see "long hair" listed as one of her turn-ons.

Perhaps that was her reaction to being married to a bald man for 13 years. That man would be her first husband, my father.

I'm not so communicative when it comes to telling her with whom I've been in contact. I've leaked only a couple of IDs, and she's been less than impressed. It's too dangerous to show her the potentially decent ones. Images of a significant other should be reserved until that other becomes truly significant. I don't want her to fire up the Fiddler On The Roof fantasy and crash when the dope dumps me after two dates.

All of which leads to the question: Who's made a match? I've had a couple promising dates, but nothing Earth-shattering. Free drinks, at least.

My mom's hottest tryst has been a trip to a shopping center food court to meet a 60-year-old mailman. They never actually connected. It was crowded and they missed each other somewhere between the hot-dog-on-a-stick place and Chick-fil-A.

So much for Match.mom.