Ellie Simmonds has revealed that she wanted to find her birth mother because she is “going into a new chapter” of her life with her partner, Matt Dean.
The Paralympian, 28, recently revealed that she was adopted as a baby and her birth mother put her up for adoption when she was just 10 days old.
Although she previously did not want to ask questions about why she was put up for adoption, Simmonds said she found herself with the “time and space” to launch her search after she retired from sport in 2020.
The gold medal-winning athlete, who was born with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, told the Daily Mail: “I’d achieved everything I wanted to. And then without the pressures of being an athlete, I had the time and space to find my birth parents.
“All my life I’ve had so many questions and I’ve often wondered if my birth mum looks like me.”
She added: “I didn’t want to leave it too late and I’m going into a new chapter of my life. I’m starting to think about settling down myself.”
Simmonds is currently dating her childhood sweetheart Dean, who also has dwarfism. They keep their relationship largely private, but she said last year that they had bought a house together in South Manchester.
While Dean prefers to avoid the spotlight, he made a rare public appearance to support his girlfriend as she competed in Strictly Come Dancing in 2022 and even encouraged her to take part in it.
She was paired with professional dancer Nikita Kuzmin, but became the sixth contestant to be eliminated after a dance-off against Molly Rainford.
Simmonds told The Sun this week: “[Dean] was like, ‘Go for it, you don’t know unless you try’. Now I’m so happy I said yes.”
As she prepares to release a new ITV documentary about her search for her birth mother next month, Simmonds said that it was the “perfect time to find out who I am and where I started from” before she enters a new phase of her life.
In Ellie Simmonds: Finding My Secret, which will air on 6 July, the swimmer speaks about finding out that her biological mother was told that children with dwarfism would “have to deal with being stared at and laughed at by other children” and would be perceived as “evil” and “stupid”.
With the help of a social worker, she found a report that described Simmonds’ mother as feeling “very guilty” about her disability and wished “she had an abortion, or that Eleanor [Simmonds] had died”.
Before she contacted her birth mother, Simmonds spoke to families who have adopted disabled children and people who felt they weren’t capable of raising one. The documentary will highlight that around 40 per cent of children in the care system and England and Wales have a disability.
She told the Mail: “It’s so sad but it’s tough to have a child with a disability because the support and care can cost more. Plus there’s the fear of the unknown.
“But actually, it’s so rewarding. A child is a child, no matter what they look like, and all that child wants is a family that can give them love.”
Simmonds did eventually reach out to her birth mother and discovered that she lived near her. They exchanged letters, in which her birth mother explained that she had separated from Simmonds’ birth father when she was pregnant with the athlete, and she “struggled with my mental health”.
They reconnected in a hotel, and Simmonds said she found that her birth mother, whose identity is protected, had the “same sense of humour” as her.
She told The Sun: “I kept looking at her and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s my mum’. I felt like her face was just like mine. What touched my heart was she said she thinks about me every day and she still sees me as her daughter.”
Simmonds was adopted by her parents, who live in Walsall, when she was three months old, and grew up with three sisters and a brother. She became the youngest member of the Great Britain team when she competed in the 2008 Summer Paralympics in Beijing at the age of 13.
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