u/Proteus61

I've been taking CBD oil every day for over a decade. Just with my vitamins in the morning. A couple of years ago I started having bad mood swings. Just cranky as heck. That's not like me so I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what was doing it. I stopped all supplements (which stopped the mood swings!) and began reintroducing them slowly.

I'm now almost certain it was the CBD. After I reintroduced it the problem returned.

So I'm here to ask if this is a known problem for some people. I like CBD for the aches & pains of aging so I'd like to take it if I can.

This all started around a month ago when I decided to do an ancestry DNA test (a classic beginning to many stories …). I decided to do it because my boyfriend had mentioned that I didn’t really look German despite my claims that I was almost entirely German, at least that is what I had been told my entire life by my father. My father used to always tell me about my family history and how our great great grandpa on his dad’s side traveled to the United States from Germany and saved up money to bring his wife and child here as well. This is a story I have told many people and German culture has always been apart of my life. But that all changed when I received my ancestry DNA results…

One of the first things I did was look at my DNA matches and I noticed that it said that my aunt (my dad’s sister) was only my half aunt and that her son was only my half cousin. I immediately chalked it up to a mistake and just continued to look at my region results where I found I was no where near as German as I had been lead to believe. In fact, I was almost as German as I was French Canadian (~20%) which was something I had never heard about in my family and it said that it was from my dad’s side. This was easy for me to brush off as well though, because my dad’s mother never knew her real dad and maybe there was a chance the French Canadian came from her?

That same night, I was visiting my sister for dinner and I had casually brought up that I did an ancestry DNA test and that it said aunt so and so wasn’t our full aunt. My sister and her husband were immediately much more concerned about it than me and it lead us to do some digging. We researched the amount of DNA that I shared with my aunt and it confirmed that there was a very little chance my aunt was our full aunt. In fact, ancestry said that with the amount of DNA we shared, there was only a 3% chance she was my full aunt…

This lead me to begin to look at my other DNA matches, and I realized I had matches on my dad’s side that my aunt did not share, pointing to the idea that my dad and his sister shared the same mom but had different dads. I also decided to use the message function to try and get some information from my other DNA matches. The next day, I was planning to have dinner with the aunt (or half aunt hahaha) that came up on my ancestry and I decided that I needed to tell her.

When I first told her, her immediate reaction was, “this must be a mistake”, but the more we explained it to her, the more things started to click for her. She then brought up some weird things that her father (my supposed grandfather) had said when he was in the nursing home with Alzheimer’s. He would call my grandma a slut, ask her if she was going to get back into bed with some guy, and would ask for the phone book so he could call a lawyer and divorce her. At the time, she had chalked it up to his mental status, but we were beginning to realize that may not have been the case.

My aunt also brought another point, my dad’s middle name, which was James. As far as she knew, there was no one else in the family named James or with that middle name. On top of that, my dad’s brother and sister were each named after their father but my dad was not named after him at all. While at my aunt’s house I received a message back from one of my DNA matches (my half second cousin) and she told me she believed she knew who my grandpa was. He had worked as a police officer in the city my dad was born in at around the time of his birth and his middle name was nothing other than James…

This relative also shared pictures of who we believed to be my dad’s real dad, and the resemblance was UNCANNY. She also shared photos of someone who would be my dad’s half brother and it was like looking into my father’s eyes again. He had the very same piercing blue eyes that my dad had.

We also learned that my real grandpa seemed to share a lot of the unsavory traits that my dad had. My dad was a mean drunk, and he actually died from complications related to his alcoholism. When my dad passed my mom had admitted that he was very mentally ill and would always talk about contemplating suicide and that behind his angry exterior he was a deeply insecure man. My real grandpa was also an abusive alcoholic just like my dad.

With all of this evidence gathered, my aunt decided she wanted to speak to her mother about it (my grandma). When confronted, my grandma confessed that she always knew it was a possibility and that she had planned to take the secret to her grave. She had even said that she felt a sense of relief when my dad passed (HER SON) because she felt like her secret was safe. She had also said that it was possible that the man my dad thought was his father knew that my dad wasn’t his son and that really explained a lot.

My dad never had a good relationship with the man he thought was his father and I think deep down my dad felt separate from his family which may have led to some of his mental health problems. I now wonder if my dad had known who his real father was if things would have been different. Would he have died of alcoholism before the age of 60? Would he have been a better, more understanding father? How would my life be different? I never had any feeling of sympathy for my father when he was alive. I had believed that he had made his decisions and that’s why he was the way he was. But now, I feel some remorse for being so harsh on him.

On the bright side of things, I have discovered a completely new side of my family that I never knew existed and they are interested in getting to know me. It turns out my real grandpa really got around and had 4 different wives and I have at least 9 half aunts and uncles that I didn’t know about. I have also learned about some traits from the family like the fact that they’re very goofy and whimsical (my half cousin’s words not mine) which helped me to understand where I got some of those traits.

I have also done some reflecting and although I do feel remorse for my dad and the things he went through in his life and have thought about how things could have been different, I also recognize that he made those decisions. I also grew up with a difficult father because of him and I grew from it. I wake up everyday and choose kindness which is a decision that he could have made as well.