I've been lurking here for some time, but this is my first post.

I have a 3 year old step daughter whom I simply can not stand. I don't want to see her face, hear her voice or interact with her in any way. And no, it wasn't always like this.

When I met my wife, she had just separated from her weird-assed now-ex husband and had an eight month old daughter. None of this bothered me in the least. I had two kids (boy,9 and a daughter, 6) from a previous marriage, so I definitely understood not only parenthood but divorce as well. The wife and I hit it off from day one. There is a 14 year age difference between us, but we are so incredibly close mentally and emotionally that it is truly meaningless. I don't believe in souls or destiny, but if soul mates are possible, we are definitely it.

Anyway, before we even started dating she brought her daughter around our workplace and I just loved the kid. Seriously. I love babies and we bonded pretty quickly. Of course, I found out about the kid's father soon enough. Hyper-religious, absolutely can not do a single thing without a member of his family (generally, Mommy) present and creepy as hell. The man stalked us almost daily for two years. He would literally follow us everywhere we went for hours on end. He would hang out behind our workplace taking photos of our coworkers' license plates. There's a store behind my apartment you say? He went there more often than I did. And he got away with it because his cousin was chief sheriff's deputy. Yay.

But despite this, my future wife and I became inseparable. So did my future stepdaughter and I. I really did treat her like she was one of my kids. I loved her like she was one of mine, too. But around one year of age, she just changed. Like one day there's this cute, happy kid there and the next I just wanted to squirt holy water on her. Firstly, she couldn't be left alone for more than 3 seconds without a total meltdown. I get separation anxiety, but this was one toke over the line. If her mother or myself went to the bathroom, she would charge screaming at the door and bang her head into it repeatedly as hard as she could. There was more than one occasion on which her forehead was visibly bruised and swollen from this. Thus went the days of crapping with the door shut. Once when she was about 2, we were all on my mother's patio when the kid decided to throw a fit. How? She sat on the patio and threw herself backwards as hard as she could, striking her head on the cement so hard that sitting ten feet away, I felt it through my seat. Initially, I though she'd knocked herself out, but she got up. Then I thought to myself "Dayum, that had to hurt! Lesson learned.". Nope! Kid sits back up and does it again. Harder. And again.

Holy crap.

Now, I've had two kids. I've been around who knows how many. I have never in all my 37 years EVER witnessed a kid like this one. I've been with her and her mom for three years now and while she no longer exhibits self destructive behavior and her separation anxiety has improved, her behavior is just horrible. Everything that involves her is a disaster. Trip to the park? At least three hysterical screaming fits over nothing. Trip to the store? Runs in front of moving cart, gets hit, shrieks like banshee, repeats in five minutes. Told to stop spinning around in chair FOR THE FIFTH TIME IN TEN MINUTES? She screams out "You don't love me! They don't love me!". You know, this kid is so hard to handle that when I see a normal kid her age just chilling out playing without a shrieking fit thrown every ten minutes, it actually shocks me. Like, I stared at this little girl in the doctor's office the other day like she just popped out of John Hurt's chest because she was acting normal. I use humor as a coping mechanism, but this really is dead serious.

At first, I loved this child. She was so great. I missed her when she was at her father's. I actually begged my wife to bring her with us on outings rather then leave her with a sitter. And even when her little "instant demon" phase hit, I was cool. No, nobody can really "be cool" with a kid who rubs her nose bloody on the inside of her crib because she woke up and it took you five minutes to get out of the bathroom, but I could deal with it. I figured that this was a child with some serious separation issues and all she needed was a calm, loving home and eventually she'd be just fine. And for a very long time, I did every thing I could to make that happen.

But eventually I just gave out. I have the unfortunate ability to remember to time virtually every event in my life because I've worked in emergency medicine since I was 19, so I've figured out that on an average day, my stepdaughter goes an average of half an hour between screaming, wailing, foot-stomping, they-hate-me-baw-aw-aw tantrums. Considering a waking day of 16 hours in duration, that's an average of 32 fits a day. Sometimes she has relatively good days where she only does this 10 or 12 times. Other days, she wakes up screaming and sobbing and just gets stuck like that without much interval. But to be honest, none of it is real. She screams. She cries. She even says she wants to kill herself (say whaaaaaaat?), but she can switch right out of that mode and stand there smiling and laughing, tears still wet on her cheeks literally seconds after saying all this horrible stuff. We send her to her room when she throws a tantrum and within seconds, she pops out saying "I'm through crying!". What kind of weird alien sociopathic crap is that?

During the darkest days of her divorce, my wife would express the desire to just give up and let her ex have total custody of their daughter, both because of his harassing behavior and their daughter's. Time and again, I supported her and told her to keep fighting. I happily dealt with this child when nobody else could get close to her. I went farther and tried harder than most men in my position would have. And now I simply am unable to deal with her. I don't want to deal with her. To be honest, I hate her. I went from loving this child to loathing her and it happened so imperceptibly slowly that I can't really figure out when it actually went south. I've just plain old run out of gas. I don't want to be around her. I've parsed through three years of this hellish little shit's crazy behavior and I am officially done. She is poison on legs and everything and everyone she comes into contact with gets hurt. My wife and I still have a strong relationship and she knows how I feel, which is a testament both to how close we are and how tired she is of her daughter, too. I very rarely spank kids. Generally speaking, only when they do something dangerous, so I'm not physical with the child. But I've come to sending her to her room every time she annoys me, which means that she's in there for most of the day. I treat her like a big old vat of toxic waste and just wall her up and pretend that she's not there. I feed her, provide her entertainment, make she she's as comfortable as she can be and then I get the hell away from her.

No, I don't want this. I want us to be happy with each other like we used to be. I actually miss that. But every single effort to make that kid happy or to even get close to her ends really quickly in abject misery for everybody. And in the absence of any better options, I've essentially quarantined her emotionally from myself. We've talked about family counseling, but my wife is afraid that records from that would find their way into any future custody proceedings (the last round was 18 months in duration and involved everything from private investigators to text message transcripts). We've talked about medicating the kid into a manageable stupor, but her father would fight that simply because he could. We've even talked about getting ourselves medicated, but we've both taken antidepressants in the past and neither of us want to repeat that. Also, it can be brought up in a custody fight. In short, there are no good options, only bad and worse ones.

And this is where we sit: with a chronically miserable, unmanageable, damaged child who is so hell bent on living in emotional agony that we have to wall her off from ourselves just to stand a chance against her dragging us down with her.