Happy, Happy, Happy (23 page)

The Almighty sends literally millions and millions of pounds of protein from one end of a continent to the other end, feeding all of these things along the way.

It’s like the mayfly on the river. A mayfly starts out as a larva in the water and looks like nothing more than a little maggot. When the water level rises, the larvae crawl up the trees on the riverbank. They build cocoons that look like spiderwebs and then emerge as flying creatures. You see mayflies flying all over the river and they live
only long enough to drop their eggs into the water. Why? Because when they die and fall into the water, fish come up and eat them. Mayflies are fish food! It’s a cycle: mayflies drop their eggs and then they die, fish eat them, the larvae climb up the trees, and then it starts all over again. Who’s feeding the fish? The Almighty is feeding the fish.

God is feeding everything, including you and me, and a lot of us in His ecosystem eat us some crawfish.

Rule No. 12 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Learn to Forgive (Life’s a Lot Easier That Way)

T
he good Lord blessed Kay and me with four healthy, obedient sons, each of whom grew up to become a godly man who loves his wife and children and shares God’s Word through his work with Duck Commander and in our church. But I’m not sure I needed to see how they came into this world! A few weeks before our youngest son, Jeptha, was born in 1978, Kay informed me she wanted me at the hospital to witness his birth.

Now, I didn’t want to be in the delivery room when Jep was born. When our oldest son, Alan, was born, I wasn’t there and he turned out fine. I wasn’t there when Jase came, but everything still turned out okay. When Willie came next, I didn’t want to press our luck, so I didn’t go to the hospital again (in fact, I was fishing when he was born). But when Kay became pregnant with
Jep, she told me it was the last baby we were going to have, so she wanted me beside her to witness God’s greatest miracle. Women being the strange creatures they are, Kay decided she needed a coach for the birth of her last child, and she insisted that I was the one to do it.

When the day arrived for Jep’s birth, Kay decided she was going to deliver him without an epidural or any kind of medication. I knew then that I had a tough woman! Over the next several hours, I watched my wife thrashing around and gritting her teeth, and then I saw Jep’s head emerge from my wife’s loins. Let me tell you something: I salute womanhood worldwide, because women are exceptionally tough for enduring the misery of childbirth. I’ve cleaned hogs and gutted deer, but in my experience on Earth I’ve never witnessed such a brutal event.

I knew right then that my sex life was over—although I somehow managed to get over my concerns thirty days later! Let me put it to you this way: after going through it once, I’d never go back and do it again. It was rough to watch, so I can’t imagine having to experience the pain. If men were in charge of carrying and birthing our babies, we’d have a lot fewer people on Earth, because we’d only do it once—I can promise you that!

Each of our boys was a blessing, and after I repented and had my life in order again, I set out to give them the same sort of childhood I had as a boy, learning to hunt and fish and live off the
land. Alan, Jase, and Willie were very close when they were growing up, and then they kind of took Jep under their wings after he was born because there was such an age gap between them. My philosophy on discipline was very simple. Since rules are made to be broken, I kept the rules few and far between. However, there was a code in the Robertson house: three licks was the standard punishment. It wasn’t ten licks or twenty licks for doing something wrong; it was always three: thump, thump, thump! It was a principle, and my boys always knew what their punishment would be if they stepped out of line.

They received three licks if they disrespected their mother. As it says in Ephesians 6:1–3, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—which is the first commandment with a promise—‘so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.’ ” I never had to tell my boys not to disrespect me; that rule was understood and it never crossed their minds to break it. None of my sons ever disrespected me, not even once. Nobody ever bowed up and told me I wasn’t going to tell them what to do.

There was literally flawless obedience when they were living under my roof—at least when I was home. If I told them to go to bed, they jumped up and went to bed. If I told them to rake the leaves, they raked the leaves. If I told them to clean the fish, they cleaned the fish. People would come over to visit us
and were amazed at how obedient our sons were. Their teachers always told us our boys were among the most well-behaved students in school. I believe it’s because my boys were always aware of the consequences of not doing what they were told to do. They always respected me, and they respected their mother because I didn’t want them taking advantage of the woman who put them on Earth.

I also didn’t allow my sons to fight with each other. They could argue and disagree all they wanted—and Jase and Willie managed to do it regularly. I didn’t have a problem with them raising their voices at each other to make a point. I wanted to encourage them to argue and make a case for their beliefs. But if it came to blows and there was meat popping, they were getting three licks each. I didn’t care who threw the first punch. If it ever came to physical blows, I’d step in and everybody involved got three licks.

Another thing I didn’t allow was tearing up good hunting and fishing equipment. I wanted them to respect someone else’s property and to be thankful for what we had, even if it wasn’t much. If one of the boys borrowed one of my guns or fishing poles and tore it up while they were using it, they received three licks. I always wanted my boys to have access to my guns to hunt, just like I had access to Pa’s guns when I was growing up. When I was young, I knew if I broke a gun, we probably weren’t going
to eat that night because we were so dependent on wild game for food. But since my boys knew there was going to be a meal on the table every night, they weren’t always as respectful of my equipment. When Alan was about fourteen, he and a few of his buddies borrowed all of my Browning shotguns to go bird-hunting. They were hunting on a muddy track and because they were careless and immature, mud got into a few of the shotgun barrels. They were very fortunate the guns still fired and didn’t blow up in their faces! When Alan returned home, he was so scared to tell me what happened to my Browning shotguns—my Holy Grails—that he enlisted Kay’s help to break the news. I’m sure Alan thought I was going to beat him on the spot, but I simply told him to go outside. I was afraid to whip him right then because I was so angry. After cooling off, I pulled Alan and his buddies together and gave them a stern lecture about gun safety and respecting other people’s property. I also told Alan—after I gave him three licks—that he was on probation from using my guns for a long time.

There was another time when I discovered that one of my boat paddles was broken. None of my boys would fess up to doing it, so I gave each of them three licks. It was kind of a military-style group punishment. It turned out that one of their buddies actually broke it, but he didn’t confess to the crime until several years later. I’m sure he realized that if he’d confessed when the boys were younger, they all would have whipped him!

As hard as Kay and I worked to instill morals, principles, and a belief in what’s right and wrong in each of our sons, it wasn’t always easy. People might watch
Duck Dynasty
and sometimes think we’re the perfect family. They see how much we love and respect each other. But the reality is that it wasn’t always easy. We had our trials and tribulations like every other family out there, and there were actually times when Kay and I believed we would lose more than one of our sons. They were the scariest times of our lives.

As hard as Kay and I worked to instill morals, principles, and a belief in what’s right and wrong in each of our sons, it wasn’t always easy.

Alan, our oldest son, probably had the roughest childhood because he was the oldest boy when I was having all of my problems. Kay was essentially a single mother for a long time, so Alan was given a lot of responsibility when he was only a young boy. When Kay started working at Howard Brothers Discount Stores, Alan was only seven but was left at home to care for Jase and Willie. Alan had to grow up really fast and didn’t get to enjoy his childhood or play baseball and other sports like his brothers did, at least not until I turned my life around. Alan also attended four or five different schools because we moved around so much, which I’m sure wasn’t very easy for him either.

Alan was a very popular kid in high school, and before long he was hanging out with the wrong crowd. I can remember one time when he and some buddies were camping at a spot down the road from our house. They were drinking beer and did some foolish things, like knocking down mailboxes along the road. Some neighbors came to our house the next morning to complain about it, and I jumped in my truck to find them. I brought Alan and his buddies back to our house and lined them up against my truck. I gave each of them three licks. There was one boy I didn’t even recognize, but I told him if he ever wanted to come back to the Robertson house, he was getting three licks like the rest of them!

After Alan graduated from high school, his behavior was so wild and out of control that Kay and I didn’t want him around his younger brothers anymore. He was the oldest boy and his brothers looked up to him, but he wasn’t setting much of an example for them. So we threw Alan out of our house, which certainly wasn’t an easy thing to do. My sister Judy was living in New Orleans at the time, and Alan moved there to live with her. You want to talk about going from the frying pan to the fire!

Alan lived in New Orleans for about two years, and he started dating a woman. She told Alan she was divorced, but she was really only separated from her husband. The husband followed Alan home from work one day and beat him really bad
with an iron tire tool. When a policeman showed up at the scene and talked to Alan, he could sense there was something different about him.