Fans know Kay Robertson as the Duck Dynasty matriarch. She is the mother to Alan, Jase, Willie, and Jep, and grandmother to 16 or so grandkids, and the wife of Phil.
While we know from watching the show that Kay and Phil have been together since their teenage years, there is still a lot we don’t know about her. In 2014, the ultra Christian matriarch revealed to Us Weekly that their first son, Alan, was born out of wedlock.
While she says that she “made a vow and to [Phil]” on March 22,1964, their marriage wasn’t legal until April 11, 1968. Alan was born on January 5, 1967. Us Weekly reported that Kay was 16 when she made that first vow to God and to Phil, when in fact, she was younger than that because she revealed at the recent “Call Her Blessed” luncheon that she was pregnant with Alan when she was 16, making her just 13 in early 1964.
For the first time ever, she shared about her experience with teenage pregnancy, something she would have in common with her future daughter-in-law, with The Tyler Morning Telegraph.
“My grandmother was my rock, and she taught me things out of the Bible and one of them was you just love your children and you fight for your children. Just like you fight for your marriage,” she said. “When I found out I was pregnant…the circumstances were not the best, but I never, ever would say anything other than I would keep this baby. In my mind, I had already found my perfect pioneer husband to be, so I never thought it would be any different.”
She recalled the moment when she told Phil, just 18 at the time, that he was going to be a father. She half expected him to run, and she’d have to raise the baby with her grandmother, but he stepped up at that moment and committed to her and their unborn child.
Their son, Alan, would go on to become a preacher and marry a woman named Lisa, who also went through a teenage pregnancy, but not with Alan.
“We both were pregnant at 16, and Kay of course chose life and I’m blessed, because I married her son that she chose life for. At 16, I made a different choice, and it’s just a matter of bringing that together and saying that we can celebrate because we have a really good friend who also got pregnant at 16 and gave her baby up for adoption, and she met her baby again when he turned 18 – the choices we all made were not easy,” Lisa said.
The luncheon where they were both speakers was “an event that gives light on pregnancy and the choices a young mother has.”
Lisa’s reason for speaking at the event and telling her story, she says, was to “give people hope because I know there will be women there that chose the same decision that I did, and I want to give those women hope that there is healing through that.”
Watch Kay and Lisa open up about her teenage pregnancy in depth here.
