Davis made good on a promise Thursday that he made the day he signed paperwork that made him a parent.
At a house on Holland Road in Belton, Davis dropped off his daughters, Brittany and Destiny Davis, so they could be reunited with their birth mother for the first time since Brittany was 15 months and Destiny 6 weeks old.
Brittany, now 18, is set to enter the Navy in 25 days. Destiny is preparing for her senior year in high school.
“Greg promised to tell them I did it out of love,” Barbara Steele said minutes before her daughters arrived. “He kept his promise.”
Over the years the girls have lived in several different states because of Davis’ job transfers. He said he did his best to make sure the girls visited as many historical sites and tourist destinations as possible.
He smiled as he talked about visiting the Grand Ole Opry and watching the space shuttle launch as a family.
“They got to see more in 17 years than most people do in 50,” Davis said.
Davis described the demeanor of his daughters immediately leading up to the reunion as “really, really scared and nervous.”
Their mother, Ms. Steele, is 38. She has had seven children and given six up for adoption.
Another daughter of Ms. Steele’s, Madison Brandt, who was reunited with her mother in 2006, was on hand Thursday to meet her sisters for the first time.
Brandt, 21, could be the bridge that helps her sisters understand why they had to grow up apart from each other. She has only known her birth mother for less than three years.
Brandt, from Georgetown, said when she was 14 she began searching for her mother on the Internet. Five years later her mother contacted her.
“I always felt like if I met my mother a void would be filled - and it’s getting there,” Brandt said. “Now that I have met them, I have all the time in the world to get to know them.”
Ms. Steele described what it was like to offer Brittany and Destiny up for adoption. She said the attorney who filed the paperwork was Martha Trudo, now the presiding judge in 426th State District Court.
“I remember Trudo looked at me and said, ‘I can’t do this unless you stop crying,’” Ms. Steele said. “I went out there my heart breaking the whole time and signed my babies off to adoption. I could have kept them but we would have lived off welfare and food stamps and had nothing.”
Brittany and Destiny said their father told them they were adopted when they were 9 and 8, respectively. Like Brandt’s reunion, the Internet also made this one possible.
Just after 10 a.m. Thursday, the girls embraced the mother who let them go so many years before. There wasn’t much eye contact or many words, but there were smiles.
When Brittany was asked why she made the decision to serve in the Navy she said, “It’s in my family. It’s in my blood.” Both her biological and adoptive fathers served in the military.
