They have the same nose, same curly hair.

They both snort when they laugh. They laugh a lot these days.

Watching Lawrence resident Stacey Hayes and her mother, Maureen Johnson, sit together on the couch and chat about the details of their lives, you’d never know they just met Thursday night.

Nearly 38 years ago, Johnson went to an Oregon hospital and gave birth to a little girl she wasn’t prepared to have. She never saw her baby; an Oregon couple adopted Hayes and raised her from infancy.

But as Hayes grew older, she longed to find a face that looked like her face, someone who could help her solve the mystery of her identity.

So, two years ago, when Oregon opened its adoption records, Hayes sent away for her birth certificate and began searching for the mom she’d never known.

After countless hours on the Internet and phone conversations with benevolent strangers, Hayes located Johnson in Gold Beach, Ore. They’ve talked on the phone and sent e-mails and photographs, but none of that compared to the feeling of meeting face-to-face for the first time.

“I thought I was going to fall down or wet my pants,” Hayes said. “It was just like you always dream of when you’re a little kid and you think you’re going to find this marvelous person.”

A better life

Everyone who was alive remembers where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot.

Johnson was in an attorney’s office, the father of a friend, talking about adoption and setting the wheels in motion to find a good family for her unborn child.

It was 1963. She was single and pregnant, working in a Portland coffee shop.

“I didn’t really know what to do,” she said.

The decision Johnson settled on has saddened her every day since.

“All these years I’ve just refused to let myself think about it,” she said Saturday, wiping tears from her eyes. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t know where she lived. I’d go back to Portland and just look (for someone who might be her daughter) … and not ever talk about it because I couldn’t.”

But Johnson can’t honestly say she regrets giving up her baby, who lived a better life with her adoptive parents than she could have had with her biological mother.

“I came from a pretty bizarre background, and I wanted nothing like that to happen to a child of mine,” said Johnson, who doesn’t have any other children. “And it didn’t.”

Hayes said her adoptive mother always knew that one day she would want to find her biological mother, and though she has not participated in the reunion, she has not stood in the way of her daughter’s dream.

Searching

Johnson has changed names and addresses several times in her 58 years, but never because she was hiding from her past.

“Whenever I would move, I’d have this little pinch of fear that maybe you were trying to find me and wouldn’t be able to,” she told Hayes Saturday.

Hayes finally found her mom in January and immediately called.

“It was like talking to myself on the phone because she sounded the same,” Hayes said.

Hayes met Johnson and her husband Thursday at Kansas City International Airport with a helium balloon that said “It’s a girl.” Complete strangers cried along with the family as they embraced. And Johnson got to meet her 17-year-old granddaughter, Haylee Potter.

The three generations of women have a lifetime of catching up to do before the Johnsons return on Monday to Oregon.

But when her mom leaves, Hayes can still thumb through the album where she’s placed all the newly acquired black-and-white photographs of grandparents and great grandparents she’ll never meet and the vivid color prints of the family she’s only beginning to know.