- As a young girl,
I didn't really know that firefighting was an option.
I had never seen a woman on a fire truck
or even knew that that was something that girls could do.
And I was at a coffee shop and I heard sirens
and the fire engine pulls up and I look out
and a woman gets off the fire truck
and she has long braids down the back.
I just looked at her and I was like,
"That's what I wanna do."
- Watch this, mama can fly like a superhero.
- When you first walk into the academy,
it's like the song where all of a sudden they start singing.
♪ Which one of these is not like the other ♪
It's very clear that you're different.
And that's familiar for me
because I always have been
just a little bit different growing up, so I recognize that.
- I'm Trey and I'm 11 years old.
- I'm seven years old.
My name's Luke and I'm about to be eight.
- When we got married, we knew we were gonna have a family
and eventually I did get pregnant
and had a healthy pregnancy and had our first son, Trey.
I tried again
and lost twins.
And then, still knew we had to have another kid,
like our family was not complete.
I was always open to like having a kid
just with what we had decided based on the fact
that there is no part-time firefighting.
There's not maternity leave.
It's not like you can work from home.
You're a full-time firefighter.
But at that point, the doc was like, "Hey, she's high risk."
You got two vessels, you gotta go for it.
When I found out that I was pregnant,
I have never felt like more feminine in my life.
Like, I remember watching TV
of shows I didn't even care about and start balling.
I had no idea really
what a woman goes through when she is having a child
and making a child and feeding a child
and all the logistics that go with that.
My mission as a captain for Orange County Fire Authority
is to make sure that they have lactation accommodations,
that we have bathrooms in all of our fire stations
dedicated for women as well.
I remember coming back from our first call,
I needed to express milk, my breasts were filling up.
It's kind of looking for a place to do it
and I chose the bathroom while it was a multi-use restroom.
So, you would just lock the door.
Well, the problem with that is,
people don't realize that it's locked
and so would bang against the door.
And so I'm sitting there,
literally with these fluorescent lights
and Metallica's playing
and it's like, I'm staring at a urinal.
And then all of a sudden, you hear a bang on the door
because somebody is trying to come in
and that rush of adrenaline moving through your body.
And just
It's probably the longest 15 minutes of my life.
It's actually federal law to have a place,
to have a lactation accommodation.
We need to make sure that we have those,
so that we are creating the infrastructure space
to grow our workforce
so that it is dual gender
and they have a place that they belong.
The department does a girls empowerment camp.
It's an opportunity for girls to work
with firefighter women and teach them the skills
that they need to do to be a firefighter.
Whether they end up going into firefighting or not,
honestly doesn't matter.
What matters is that they know that they can do something
that before the camp they didn't have the confidence to do.
- Lauren likes, she likes sports a lot more.
Sarah, she watches more reality TV shows
and no one ever touches the TV remote ever,
unless there's a game on.
Our secret to being able to co-parent,
was keeping that respect for each other, that we never lost.
- One of the things, I think that's so hard
when you're going through divorce
is you're so worried about your kids.
And it just seems so awful.
We kind of said like,
"You know, our family is just going to look different,
but we're still gonna be family."
And we really tried to stick to that too.
- Digital learning is not fun,
not half as fun as regular school for me anyway.
Oh yeah.
Homeschool was really, really hard.
It was really rough for me.
I did not feel good at it,
I felt like I didn't have any patience.
I'd rather run into a burning building
and firefight all day than homeschool my kids.
It was the toughest thing that I've ever done.
Honestly, if I never do a zoom homeschool again
I'll be the happiest woman in the world.
I had recently had Luke, my second son
and at night I would be really missing him a lot.
I just said, "Cap, I need something to distract myself."
And he's like, "How about you learn the bagpipes with me?"
And I'm like, "Okay."
Such a loud resonating sound.
It makes you present.
The struggle for myself as a mother is just being present,
being where I am.
Not being in my head about what my kids doing
or what I should be doing at work.
It's just really being in the moment, right now.