Decades and a Facebook post later, B.C. woman reunites with foster mom

WARNING: This story contains details of abuse, overdose, and trauma.

A Merritt, B.C., woman has been reunited with the foster mom who gave her a ray of hope she says she'll never forget.

Jessica Cressey spent some of her earliest days living in hotel rooms with her biological mother, where she was sexually abused and surrounded by drugs, alcohol and crime, she says. 

"My mom was just drinking and partying with a bunch of random strangers, and she left me in [a] hotel room," Cressey told CBC Radio West host Sarah Penton.

But at six, Cressey, a member of the Nicomen Indian Band, was taken out of that world and placed into a foster home.

There, she says, she briefly experienced what it was to be loved — an experience that helped turn her life around despite the challenges she faced along the way.

Now 37, Cressey has an 18-year-old son of her own. She works at a copper mine in the B.C. Interior, and says she has been sober for six years. 

According to B.C. government data, more than 3,700 children and youth went through the foster care system last year, down from more than 5,500 in 1997 when the province began to collect data on foster placements. 

Like Cressey, a disproportionate number of those children were Indigenous — up to 45 per cent, according to provincial data. The foster care system has been criticized for its impact on Indigenous children and First Nations communities.

Cressey says she was in and out of an estimated 36 homes by the time she was 16, and experienced abuse and trauma, which she says would later fuel a dependence on drugs and alcohol. 

She says although much of her childhood is blurry, she distinctly remembers the last time she saw her mother alive before dying of a heroin overdose.

Cressey was six years old and alone in a hotel room when police, ambulance and social workers arrived. She says they took her to a nearby bar where her mother was in a bathroom stall, "screaming her head off." 

Cressey was then placed into the care of Bjòrg Bergmann-Buhler, a foster parent in the community of Revelstoke, B.C., where she says she immediately felt peace and calm.

"I felt heard, I felt important, I felt wanted, I felt needed, I felt loved," Cressey said of her time there.