My daughter told her teacher she's British. I sat in my car and cried.

My daughter's teacher called me in for parents evening last week. She said my daughter had told the class during a discussion about heritage that she is British. Not Nigerian British. Just British. The teacher was smiling, like it was a cute thing.

I drove home and sat in my car outside the house for twenty minutes. I didn't go inside. My mother sold her wrappers in Dugbe market in Ibadan to send me to nursing school. My father never owned a car in his life. And now my child is sitting in a London classroom telling people she has no other home.

I know it's not her fault. She was born here. She has never spent more than three weeks in Nigeria. She doesn't know what it feels like to buy suya on Bodija road at night or hear the rain on a zinc roof. But when she said it, something in me just went quiet. I didn't correct her. I didn't know how. How do you teach a child to miss a place she never really lived?