With the highly anticipated first episode of Married At First Sight Australia airing in New Zealand on Sunday, we’ve met bride Poppy Jennings, a single mother of twin boys.
Poppy tied the knot with FIFO worker and dad of two Luke Eglin on the reality TV show, and as she shared her back story we learned she had been devastated when her first marriage ended just six weeks after she gave birth to twin boys.
The vivacious mother of two quickly endeared herself to fans with the revelation: “I was married. We were together for nine years and we had two little boys.
“But when our boys were six weeks old my husband had a terrible accident.”
“It was a really, really hard time in my life…
“He tripped and fell and… landed in his co-worker’s vagina.
“And he’s still stuck there.”
But while three years on since the betrayal Poppy is able to joke about the affair, it’s not hard to imagine how difficult a time it would have been for her.
“I did not see it coming,” she has admitted. “I was breastfeeding them on this pillow called My Breast Friend and he came home and said ‘I don’t love you any more.'”
Now Poppy has been dealt a second bitter blow, after finding out that her ex husband’s co-worker is pregnant.
“That really upset me,” she told TV WEEK. “I was mortified.”
The photographer from Wollongong, NSW, says in hindsight she could sense that “something wasn’t right” in the relationship in the weeks before it ended.
“Then I ended up in hospital for a month – I had pre-eclampsia. They were basically just waiting until it was too dangerous to wait any longer and then they did an emergency caesarean.”
Her ex husband’s betrayal has meant she is fearful of being hurt again.
Poppy applied to appear on MAFS because she wanted her boys, who are now almost three years old, to grow up with two parents in a stable relationship.
With Luke being a father of two teens himself, he certainly understands the realities of being a parent.
One of Poppy’s greatest hurdles before joining the show was finding someone she trusted to look after her two sons while she was away for filming, she revealed to TV WEEK.
She turned to her mum – but finding a future partner who can support her and help care for her boys is clearly going to be a priority.
“I literally only trust my mum,” she reveals. “She’s 70. Every time she looks after them when I work, I get back and she looks like she’s just fought in Iraq.
“My family didn’t want me to do it [go on MAFS]. They were like, ‘You’re going away for this amount of time, leaving Mum and the boys?’ I felt so guilty.”
But it was something Poppy felt strongly about, despite knowing it was going to be incredibly tough being separated from her sons.
“It’s been just me and them for such a long time,” she says. “I tear up every time I talk about them.”
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