Walking into Mary Engelbreit’s studio is like stepping into one of her books -- a whimsical, bright space brimming with preciousness and a sprinkle of sass.

Eight decorative birdhouses are perched on top of a short wall by the entry. There’s a checker-print sofa with Scottish terriers on the throw pillows. A cheerful quilt hangs on the wall and a cacophony of dolls, figurines and stuffed animals are crammed on the shelves.

The artist who created this licensing empire -- with more than 13,000 pieces of saleable art, including calendars, books, tea sets, ribbons and fabrics -- is a 67-year-old St. Louisian, and she’s now calling out her own sheltered world of cuteness.

Engelbreit enters her workspace wearing a printed floral scarf and red-framed glasses, appearing every bit the Midwestern grandmother you might expect.

That is, until the conversation gets political.

“Now I’m focused on how many senators are willing to sell their souls to cover up for this moron,” she said during a recent visit. If there’s any doubt who she’s referring to, a scroll through her Instagram feed makes the subject of her ire crystal clear.

“This is WAY more than Democrat/Republican,” she wrote in response to a follower upset by one of her recent posts. “This is moral/immoral. You can be a Republican and not support Trump. But if you do support him, you are a supporting a white supremacist, uneducated, lying, grifting, racist, narcisstic, evil sexual predator, and all of your ‘Can’t we all just love one another?’ is meaningless and insulting to all the people Trump seeks to disenfranchise.”

But tell us how you really feel, Mary.

Her artwork changed forever the day police fatally shot teenager Michael Brown in 2014.

The morning she heard about the shooting, she felt compelled to draw. Years earlier, her son Evan had died of a gunshot wound when he was near Brown’s age. She and her husband adopted his biracial daughter as their own. Brown’s death triggered those painful emotions -- and her anger.

The image that emerged that day was unlike the lighthearted drawings for which she’s known. A black mother held a black child in her arms, a tear falling from her eye. She looks at a newspaper that reads: “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Mother and child are framed by Engelbreit’s stark caption: “No one should have to teach their children this in the USA.”

She didn’t tell anyone in her family-run company about the image before posting it on the company’s Facebook page. She was 62 at the time, and until then, she had not faced any serious criticism about her work.

That was about to change.

Her son Will Delano, the president of the company, said they lost 11,000 followers that first day.

“Our key demographic is middle-aged to upper-middle-aged women, who may not have ever had negative issues with the police,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say I was very scared when she spoke out.”

He tried to talk her into toning down her comments for a week or two, and fielded some threatening calls from enraged fans.

Engelbreit was shocked at the ugliness of the comments, and worried about the impact the backlash could have on her employees and her family. She wondered if she had destroyed a 40-year career with a single drawing. But at the end of the day, that fear wasn’t enough to deter her.

After decades of drawing cute, she needed to speak her mind.

“I didn’t care if I lost or gained followers,” she said. “These things were important to me. These were the things I was going to draw.”

Sales from that print ended up raising $40,000 for the Michael Brown Jr. Memorial Fund.

Friends who have known Engelbreit for decades describe her as generous and genuine. But she’s well aware that the world can be far from a bowl of cherries -- or a chair of bowlies, as she famously coined early in her career.

In order to share the snarkier side of her personality, Engelbreit launched an edgier line of black-and-white cards, called “Engeldark,” a few years ago.

“I was a little uncomfortable with that reputation of being a sweet, nice person,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to have it all out there.”

It can be jarring to see these worlds collide on her Instagram. Pictures of her adorable 7-month-old granddaughter appear next to inspirational quotes and colorful drawings, alongside an archival black-and-white photo of children behind barbed wire. Engelbreit posted that picture on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, drawing parallels to the current administration’s policies in her caption: “Children ripped from their families, kept in cages, dying of neglect -- sound familiar?”

If Trump supporters are troubled by her opinions, Engelbreit says they are free to leave her page.

“If you support him, go, because these drawings just aren’t meant for you,” she said.

Her son keeps a close eye on her social media pages, and has read thousands of critical comments since she started speaking out. But he can also recall three instances in which people changed their minds after interacting with her.

That makes him “insanely proud” of his mom, he said.

They may have lost followers initially, but they’ve more than made up for them now.

One compelling storyline in the Oscar-nominated film “Marriage Story” reveals how two people who still care for one another, and who adore their young son, end up in a bitter and costly divorce.

The Hollywood portrayal of a drawn-out, painful and expensive custody battle is hitting close to home for those in the trenches of relationship warfare. Katy Walter, chief executive officer for Kids In the Middle, a nonprofit organization that helps families during and after divorce, says they are seeing an increase in the number of high-conflict family transitions. Several divorce attorneys report the same trend.

“I think they’ve become more contentious,” said Joseph Lambson, a divorce attorney based in Clayton, Missouri. “It seems like divorces are falling on one of two paths,” he said. “Either they mutually realize it’s in their best interest to keep it focused on the best interests of the kids, or it’s a full-throttled attempt to gain the upper hand.”

So, why are custody battles getting messier?

Lambson said there’s a noticeable rise in the number of cases involving a mental health diagnosis for one or both parents, or one of their children.

“I have seen more cases in 2019 than the previous five years combined” that involve mental illness, he said. That puts one parent into the role of trying to protect the child from the other parent, or it can spar disagreements on how to handle a child’s special needs.

Attorney Susan Block, also of Clayton, agrees that mental health disorders are playing a bigger role in divorce proceedings, as are substance abuse issues. Sadly, the mental health of the children sometimes takes a back seat to the desire of sparring parents.

“Right now, we are seeing a lot of anxiety, isolation, social media being abused,” she said. The move toward shared custody may not be the best solution for children in this situation.

“A kid that is anxious cannot benefit from that many transitions,” she said, especially if there are different rules and routines in each household. Lambson agreed that the trend toward 50/50 custody has not reduced litigation in Missouri.

“There’s more to fight about,” he said.

Unique parenting plans can create more conflict among parents who already aren’t communicating well, Walter said. And when a plan breaks down or needs to be modified, the family ends up back in court. She said they are also dealing with more cases involving parents who have never been married, which can complicate co-parenting arrangements.

She added that many of the same tensions and problems present in society filter down to families. For example, if a parent airs his or her grievances on social media, a child could access that.

“When kids come in, the amount of information that they know (during a divorce) is pretty astounding,” she said. Most of this information isn’t helpful for the child.

Susan Myres, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, said the rise in contention in divorce is mirroring the rise in conflict in society.

“There’s high conflict because bad behavior is not punished,” she said. “You can say and tweet all sorts of offensive things, which triggers an offensive response, and there doesn’t seem to be accountability.”

She suggested that if there were serious consequences for a person tweeting insults and mistruths, repeating bad things to children, or yelling at others during a divorce or separation, then these behaviors wouldn’t be as prevalent.

Today’s polarized environment can also make co-parenting more challenging for those on opposite sides of the political divide.

Jason Young, 49, of Chesterfield, Missouri, divorced nearly 11 years ago when his children were young. He and ex-wife Cynthia O’Toole, 43, of O’Fallon, Missouri, have vastly different political views.

Young said it has created some moments of tension -- for example, when his young daughter comes to his house wearing the T-shirt of a candidate his mother supports and he strongly opposes. Meanwhile, O’Toole says she is disturbed when her children come home “with a crazy idea or crazy view” they’ve heard from their father.

“That poses a challenge,” she said. “I basically bring them back to reality.”

Despite their differences, both Young and O’Toole say they had a relatively low-conflict divorce.

“I learned a long time ago that fighting doesn’t solve anything,” Young said. During their separation, they kept the best interests of their kids front and center.

That, experts say, is the key to avoiding additional heartache.

I dropped the handwritten thank-you card into my “good mail” folder in the file cabinet under my desk. That’s where I keep a few of the best notes mailed from readers.

I had no idea Ria Van Ryn had been dying of cancer when she sent it. Maybe she didn’t even know herself.

I first heard of Ria when she taught my daughter’s English class in ninth grade. My daughter mentioned that “Dr. Van Ryn” was a tough but excellent teacher.

Someone with a doctorate, teaching freshman English in a public school? That’s a little unusual.

It turns out that Ria often chose the unusual path. She had just left a tenure-track teaching position at Yeshiva University in New York City -- a position she earned after getting one master’s degree in religious studies, as well as another master’s and a doctorate in sociology.

But it was too expensive to live in Manhattan on a young academic’s salary, and she had a dream of becoming a mother.

So she headed back to St. Louis, where she had been raised, and where her mother and one of her sisters taught in her childhood school district. She earned her third master’s degree -- this one in education -- and a teaching certificate before getting a job teaching high school English and social studies.

Raised Unitarian, Ria had converted to Judaism in graduate school.

Her dissertation focused on a Jewish day school and a Muslim day school: She was interested in how children followed their parents’ religious traditions and how they learned about other religions. At the end of her project, she brought the kids together for a day of service and a shared meal.

As devoted as she was to her students, she wanted a child of her own. She was single, and decided to pursue fertility treatments. It took a year to get pregnant.

She gave birth to Schuyler in August of 2017, when she was 37.

Her family was thrilled.

“She was Jewish by choice and a single mother by choice,” her sister Trina Van Ryn said.

Ria told her parents, Debbie and Jack, that they were going to be co-parents with her. A tight-knit family, they call themselves Team Van Ryn.

In July of 2018, when Ria’s eyelid started drooping, her father urged her to have it checked out. A CT scan showed she had gastrointestinal neuroendocrine cancer with tumors in her chest and stomach: a rare, aggressive and unpredictable cancer.

Her daughter was 11 months old.

Ria didn’t want to know the survivability rate; whatever it was, she had every intention of beating it. She had been a state-level swimmer in high school, and had run 13 marathons. She would fight this.

Her father, an orthopedic surgeon, knew the odds.

The family kept their fears and grief to themselves. They were Team Ria.

“We will be with you every step of the way,” her sister Zannah told her.

Ria filled a binder with information and questions, and carried it with her to every doctor’s appointment. She went through seven different chemo and immunotherapies in 15 months.

She also kept teaching.

During this time, she emailed me -- “at no small risk” to herself, she wrote -- to talk about incidents of racism in the school that concerned her. Eventually, she took her concerns higher, personally meeting with the district superintendent.

“What do I have to lose?” she told her mom. “I have cancer.”

Her family rarely saw her cry -- only when she talked about wanting more time with Schuyler.

But she never talked about dying.

Shortly after Christmas, my daughter’s principal emailed the students and parents about Ria’s death. When I read her obituary, I realized we had both graduated from Trinity University and majored in sociology. She had taught my daughter, and yet we had spoken just once, about a story tip.

Ria’s Unitarian family sat shiva for her.

On New Year’s Day, three days after her death, Schuyler asked her Grammie and Opa, “Where’s Mama?” She knew her mother had been in the hospital and sick, but she wanted her now.

Both of them took her by the hand and walked outside.

“See the sky, where it’s so blue?” Jack said, pointing up. “That’s called heaven. That’s where Mama is, and there are no boo-boos in heaven. Mama’s going to stay in heaven, but she wants you to stay here with Grammie and Opa.”

Two-year-old Schuyler looked up to the sky and said, “Hi, Mama.”

She turned to her Opa and said, “Mama blew me a kiss.”

I wish I had written back to Ria when she sent me that note a few months before she died. I think about the writer and reader my daughter has become. Ria helped do that.

Through the lives she touched, she’s blowing kisses back to all of us.