Migraine, Migraine, Go Away

I’m sure all of you have heard the old nursery rhyme, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day.” I’m sure when you were a child, there was at least one day that you were sitting inside on a rainy day when you’d hoped to be outside playing. You looked up at the clouds, your tiny heart breaking, and sang that song to them.

But you didn’t really mean it.

It’s not that you didn’t mean for the rain to clear up; it was stealing your fun. Chances are, every time it rained when you were a kid, you wished it would go bother someone else. You wanted it to stop, but you never wanted it to come back.

So why does the rhyme go that way? Were the original authors hoping to trick the rain into never coming back by just putting it off every time? Did they think that the rain would happily leave as long as it was assured that it could come back at a later date? Maybe the rhyme was better than saying “don’t ever come back and ruin my fun ever again.”

In a strange twist of fate, the word “migraine” also rhymes, and fits into the old tune quite easily. But I would never invite back something that combines a severe headache with nausea and sensitivity to light and sound.

So whenever I have one, I just sing the first line of the nursery rhyme (whenever I’m not feeling too ill to move). I don’t say the “never come back” part, since it wouldn’t rhyme, but it is assumed.

Migraine, migraine, go away.