Tea for Two: Why Motherhood Made Me Rethink What's in My Cup

This article is in partnership with Kindred Harvest. The boys are asleep upstairs, the two big ones in the room they share, the baby in the nursery with his sound machine still humming. I have about 40 minutes before someone pads down the stairs asking for waffles. It’s a slow morning, which makes it a tea morning instead of a coffee one. My mug is the heavy white stoneware one with the chipped handle that my husband keeps threatening to throw out. I won’t let him, because it holds exactly 12 ounces and warms my hands the way the thin ones don’t. I drop in the bag, pour, and sit at the table by the window, where the light hasn’t come up over the neighbors’ roofline yet. Steam, something green and grassy, and three minutes with nothing to do but wait. I’ve had some version of this moment every morning for years. But the cup in front of me is not the cup I used to drink, and getting here took a baby and one label I happened to read. Tea was my thing long before kids. In my 20s, when I was running my own lifestyle blog out of a one-bedroom apartment, I went through three or four cups a day without a second thought: black with a splash of milk at my desk, another by 11, green after lunch when I needed to feel like a woman who had her act together. Lorelai Gilmore would say I was drinking the wrong beverage entirely. Lorelai Gilmore has never had tea with honey while editing a 4,000-word essay at midnight. The cup in front of me is not the cup I used to drink. Whatever brand was on sale was the brand I bought. I loved them for exactly what they gave me, which was comfort and a reason to pause. I never read past the name on the front. If you’d asked me what the bag itself was made of, I would have said paper, with total confidence and zero evidence. Then I got pregnant with my oldest, and my attention widened. I started turning things over to read the back: the prenatal vitamins, the lotion, the laundry detergent, the can of tuna. I remember standing at the sink with a body wash I’d used for a decade, reading a list of ingredients I couldn’t pronounce and realizing I had never once wondered about them. The tea surprised me most, because the box told me so little. It named the leaves but said nothing about what the leaves were sitting in, or how they’d traveled from a field to my cabinet. I had been treating tea as a single simple ingredient when it is a finished product with a supply chain, same as everything else in the pantry. The shift came from the simple math of pregnancy: whatever I put in my body, someone else was getting too. For the first time, my body was something a very small person depended on, and I wanted to take good care of it for his sake. Three boys later, I still do. We will agonize over whether our coffee beans are single-origin and whether the oat milk has gums in it, and then we’ll steep a bag we have never examined in boiling water, twice a day, for 20 years. So, a few questions I wish I’d asked sooner. What is the bag made of? Is it paper, or something that looks like paper? What holds it closed, and what does hot water do to that? What about the leaves: where were they grown, and what was in the soil and the water? Where was the whole thing blended and packed, and by whom? Most of us never think to ask these questions because tea has been in our grandmothers’ cabinets forever, and it feels like the one thing that couldn’t possibly need a second look. Which is exactly why it deserves one. I went looking for a tea that answered those questions without my having to email anyone, and I found Kindred Harvest . The bags are 100% biodegradable and made from corn, with no microplastics, no glues, and no heavy metals. The ingredients are all-natural, the green tea is organic, and everything is blended and packed in the USA. That was the entire checklist I’d been carrying around in my head, and I had half assumed no one would tick every box. What kept me around, though, was the why. Kindred Harvest was built on the bond of family, a real love for creation, and respect for the body you were given. I recognized that reasoning immediately, because it is the same thing that had me reading the back of a body wash bottle at seven months pregnant. A company that starts from “someone I love is going to drink this” makes different choices than one that starts from a spreadsheet, and you can taste it. Here’s how a day of it goes at my house. (If you want to try any of these, use code EVIE for 15% off your order, including subscriptions .) Green, first thing, on the mornings that allow it. Most days still start with black coffee, but when nothing is on fire and no one has an early drop-off, I swap it for green. My doctor and I are happier when I don’t start every day with coffee. It’s the one from the window, and it is the most grown-up green I’ve found: grassy and clean, with no bitterness even when I forget it’s steeping because someone needs help finding a shoe. Black, mid-morning, once the boys are fed and I’m at my desk working through the contributor queue. It’s brisk and full, the kind of black tea that can take a splash of milk and still taste like itself. Vanilla Chai at 2 has replaced the energy drink I used to crave. It’s a sweet black tea with cardamom and vanilla, best with a splash of milk, and the lift it gives me lasts from the afternoon slump all the way to bedtime. Tea tins are the only cans my desk has seen in weeks. Immunity is what I reach for when the weather turns and the 3-year-old comes home from preschool with that look. I won’t make promises about what it does for you, but I can tell you what it tastes like, which is warm and a little sweet, with lemongrass and elderberry up front, licorice underneath, and a ginger finish that lingers. It tastes like being looked after. I have it around 4 with a square of dark chocolate. Earl Grey is the weekend one. It’s rich and citrusy, the bergamot bright without being perfumey, and this Saturday I’m making a London fog with it: steeped strong, a little honey, and fresh milk from the farmers market frothed on top. I will be pretending the kitchen is a café, and no one under 4 feet tall is allowed to stop me. Cinnamon Apple is the new evening cup, now that the temperature drops a little more each day. It’s a rooibos base, so no caffeine, with real apple bits and cinnamon chips, and it tastes like the inside of a bakery in October. I drink it by the fire after the boys are down, while I decide whether I’m ready to call it a night. Sleep is my favorite, and I say that as someone who used to think chamomile tasted like a wet lawn. This one is soft and a little sweet, with chamomile and lemongrass doing most of the work, a whisper of lavender, and enough spearmint to keep it bright. I make it after bedtime, when the house finally goes still, and it has become the signal that the day is over and it’s my turn now. Somewhere between baby one and baby three, I stopped thinking of tea as the thing I drank while I did something else and started thinking of it as the thing I did. I fill the kettle and pick the mug, and I watch the water turn the color of honey. Three minutes of standing still in a kitchen where I am usually moving at a jog. Motherhood is wonderful. It is also loud, and it does not hand you quiet. You have to make it, and the making can be very small. For me it’s a corn-based tea bag and a chipped white mug at 5:40 in the morning, before anyone needs anything. Kindred Harvest’s tagline is “Drink beautiful tea,” and I resisted it at first because it sounded like something off a tote bag. Then I understood that the beauty they mean is the ordinary kind: a good cup, taken on purpose, in a life that is very full. Toxins matter when it’s tea for two. There is something about a warm mug in the fall, specifically. Nothing around me has changed. I still have three small children and a to-do list that regenerates overnight. But with the cup in my hands, the air a little crisper and the flavors a little richer, I feel like I’m slowing down enough to notice the season instead of just dressing the kids for it. This is also, for the record, the gift I give now. If you have a friend who is expecting, a sister with a newborn, or a mother who taught you how to make tea in the first place, a box of Kindred Harvest says the right thing without your having to find the words. It tells her you thought about what she’s putting in her body right now, because you know she’s thinking about it too. Toxins matter when it’s tea for two, and a pregnant friend will know exactly what you mean by that. So will your mom. It’s 6:20 now. I can hear the sound machine click off upstairs, and in a minute there will be feet on the stairs, and then there will be waffles. But the cup is still warm in my hands, and the window has gone from gray to gold, and I’ve had my 40 minutes. I have a small daily place to stand, and I know that what’s in the cup is as good as it tastes. If you want to try it, Kindred Harvest’s subscription is the easiest and most affordable way to keep the cabinet stocked. Use code EVIE for 15% off your order, including subscriptions. You can find everything at kindredharvest.co . Now go put the kettle on.