Sam Wood on becoming a dad later in life, family life
Ten years ago Sam Wood declared his love for Snezana Markoski on national TV. A lot has changed for both since that moment.
Lifestyle
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Sam Wood has never seen himself as a stepdad.
From the minute he fell in love with single mum Snezana on The Bachelor Australia in 2015, he was clear about the role he wanted to play in her nine-year-old daughter Eve’s life.
“It’s almost as though she’s always been with me. It doesn’t feel like I wasn’t there for the first nine years of her life.”
It was actually Eve who first encouraged her mum to go on the reality show that changed their lives.
Sam and Snez knew almost instantly that there was something special between them, but the stakes were always going to be higher with a child involved.
As they were getting to know each other, Sam was also exploring his relationship with Eve.
“I think you learn a lot in your early days as a parent when the kids are little. You learn a lot about your own children and yourself.
“Then when you meet someone and they’re already nine and they become your child, there’s a huge amount of sensitivity in making sure that you are not positioning things in a way that’s not them … I’ve always let Eve drive the speed in which our relationship developed.
“It was very important to me that she dictated the terms, and I was absolutely there for her. She categorically knew what role I wanted to play, but there was no rush on my part.”
Introducing a new partner to your child is a big step, and one that needs a lot of consideration.
You want to be as certain as you can that this person is committed to you before your child forms an attachment with them – you risk more than one heart breaking if things don’t work out.
For Snez, who openly admitted on the show that she hadn’t had many partners since becoming a mum, introducing her daughter to Sam during filming was “kinda huge”.
It was a big step for Eve too, who was understandably protective of her mum when she first met Sam on the show.
She cut straight to the chase and asked, “How much do you like my Mum out of 10?” He laughed and replied, “About 9.4 out of 10.”
Since that life-changing moment, Sam admits that he made plenty of mistakes as he tried to work out how to parent a child he’d only just met.
“I’d find myself making the wrong decision or even saying, ‘oh, I probably didn’t handle that that well’. It’s hard when you don’t have a warm-up.”
The newly-formed trio found a way to make it work. Snez and Eve left their home in Western Australia to move to Melbourne with Sam, and just six months after Snez stepped out of the limousine on the set of The Bachelor, Sam asked her to marry him.
“When you know, you know. I love you, Snezana,” he wrote on Instagram at the time.
Falling in love and becoming a dad were things that Sam always knew he wanted. In fact, he thought he would be married with three kids before his mid-30s.
So when he found himself single at 35 and life hadn’t played out as he’d hoped, he started to feel “disconcerted” and worried that his dream of having a family might never be realised.
“It definitely wasn’t how I thought things were gonna pan out, you know? I opened a kids’ gym when I was 26 years old and had kids everywhere. I was king of the kids, so that was a hard job for 10 years.
The amount of parents that said to me, ‘Sam, when are you having kids? Like, you clearly should be a dad.’ And I’m like, ‘I dunno, one day when I get my shit together.’
“I was always sure that I wanted to be a dad. It just hadn’t happened yet.”
Two years after meeting, Snez and Sam had their first child together, a little girl called Willow. Both Eve and Willow were part of the bridal party when their parents became the second Bachelor couple to say “I do”.
They tied the knot in December 2018 during a picture-perfect ceremony at Byron Bay on the NSW north coast.
The most memorable moment of the day for Sam was when his girls held hands as they walked down the aisle together to one of his late mum’s favourite songs, Here Comes the Sun.
Sam was well on the way to creating the big family he’d always dreamed of when Charlie, another little girl, was born in 2019, and their fourth daughter, Harper, arrived in May 2022.
“People go to me, ‘Oh, mate, how do you cope, because you’ve kind of gone from zero to a hundred so fast. It was Snez and Evie from day one, and snap, you’ve had three more kids and you’ve gone from living in a crappy apartment all by yourself to living in a crazy madhouse with a beautiful wife and four kids in what feels like five minutes.’”
Now, with the beautiful wife and four daughters, life sounds exactly how he had hoped it would be.
“I always knew I wanted to have a big family, and it just feels right. I can’t even imagine life any other way.”
Through Eve’s tween years and into her teens, Sam had to work out what sort of role he played in Eve’s life. Was he a father figure? A friend? A fun-cle (fun uncle)? A goofy flatmate? All of the above? Ultimately, he decided that their relationship had progressed enough that he was simply her dad.
“We had become close enough by her teens that I absolutely treated her exactly like I would my birth daughter. There was no differential treatment or anything like that.
“You know, tough love and discipline and all that kind of stuff. She’s a pretty strong-minded young woman, we bang heads a lot, and I just think, ‘You’re not getting away with this stuff …’ I’m definitely not as hard on Eve as my Dad was on me, but I’m strict about manners and rules and basic things that I think will hold her in really good stead as she goes out in the real world on her own.
“She’s growing up so fast, she won’t be with us forever, and I just wanna make sure that she’s as well equipped to handle this crazy world as she can be.”
Watching Eve grow into a young woman seemingly overnight has made Sam cherish the time he gets to spend with his younger girls even more. And while life with three under six is “a lot”, he reminds himself how quickly time goes.
“It gives us a greater appreciation that it’s not gonna be long before they’re not kids anymore. And as much as it is exhausting because they need you so much, I love that they need you
so much.”
Since being fast-tracked to fatherhood, Sam has learned a lot – about himself and being a parent.
“I’ve got this thought: you can’t really parent wrong. I think if you’re trying and you’re there and they know you’re there, that’s 90 per cent of being a great parent, you know? … I always find the best moments with the kids are the little things when you least expect it, the quirky little things that they say or the special cuddles or laughs in the car. It’s a bit cliched, but that is what is truly important to me right now.”
Originally published as Sam Wood on becoming a dad later in life, family life
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