A Daughter’s Love

Angel Brown Reveles sees herself in every client 

Published in 2024 Texas Rising Stars magazine

By Artika Rangan Casini on March 18, 2024

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Cruel taunts about her mother’s addiction changed the course of Angel Brown Reveles’ life.

“Making me feel bad about what my mom did, and making me feel like I wasn’t going to be good enough to be anything,” she says, “made me want to be the absolute best I could be.” 

Today, the Dallas-based attorney practices family law and child welfare at Brown Reveles Law Group, taking on nearly 100 cases each year. Her clients range from newborn twins weaning off fetal drug addiction, to a teenager who has been in foster care for nearly a decade. She also represents parents and handles adoptions but, as she says, “kids are my heart.”

The Girls Embracing Mothers participants and volunteers at GEM’s annual camp.

In each one, Brown Reveles sees herself. And by simply standing before her clients, Brown Reveles offers a mirror of possibility in return. “When my kids learn that I struggled with the same things they’re struggling with, they’re shocked. I tell them, ‘This circumstance you’re in, I understand that it ain’t the best, but you get to decide what happens after this,” she says. “My mom struggled with addiction; my dad was in prison. Nobody is over here thinking I’m going to do anything with myself. But I made the decision that I wanted to do more and be better. It doesn’t matter where you started—it matters where you finish.’”

This is the advice she heard time and again from her grandmother. Brown Reveles heeded it and graduated fourth in a high school class of nearly 1,400. When she applied to Rice University, classmates said she was wasting her time. When she got in, a teacher didn’t believe her. “I like a challenge,” she says with a smile.

At Rice, she discovered the now-defunct Houston Scholar Program, which provided mentorship, housing, and support for high school students experiencing challenges at home. To participate, Brown Reveles became a licensed foster parent to teens just a few years younger than herself. She would drive them to school, share meals together, and spend time with them in the common study room. Now, they are teachers, doctors, and engineers. “I look on Facebook and see them with their families, and I can’t believe it,” Brown Reveles says. “No, I can believe it. Because they were amazing.”

Brown Reveles met Brittany Barnett at Southern Methodist University, bonding immediately and talking for hours about their turbulent childhoods. “It was surprising because I was always so ashamed of it,” says Brown Reveles. “I didn’t like people to feel sorry for me, so I played it cool when I may have been getting dressed in my car that morning.”

In return, Barnett shared her experiences as the daughter of an incarcerated mother. Barnett’s passion project to support such complex mother-daughter relationships, Girls Embracing Mothers (GEM), had not yet made national headlines for its work to support mothers in prison. “These people that have been written off as ain’t good enough, worthless—these are our moms,” Brown Reveles says. “That’s what people don’t understand.”

More than 10 years later, GEM offers youth programming like cooking and sexual abuse seminars, “the kinds of things you’d normally learn from your mom,” says Brown Reveles, who serves on the GEM board. It also provides on-staff therapy, job training, familial support, and much more. “You could have a program that gets girls together to give them gifts, but we’re going further,” she adds. “We’re looking at the heart of the issues and doing the hard work.”

After all, healing takes work—and love. Sober for more than 20 years now, Brown Reveles’ mom, Martha, is the family caretaker. “Amazing, kind, and sweet,” the 65-year-old remains “one of the most beautiful women you’ll ever meet,” her daughter says.

“One of the reasons I don’t give up on my clients is because I see their potential. If everybody had given up on my mom, if I had given up on having a relationship with her, then she wouldn’t be the grandma she is to my children, or the support she is to me. She is a blessing to her family.”

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