Deborah Hill Cone: Don't call me 'mum' or Mrs X

Amal Alamuddin and Karen Price. Photos / AP, Richard Robinson

Mother of six. Three words, but oh, wow. What heavily freighted words they are; unwieldy with virtue and sacrifice and assumption.

Lucy Knight, the very brave woman who intervened in an Auckland bag snatch was, according to friends, very happy to be described in this way - as a mother of six. Did she get a choice? I hope so. Because not all of us are delighted to have our identity defined by our family relationships.

Karen Price is David Cunliffe's wife. Amal Alamuddin will now be George Clooney's wife, rather than lawyer of stature in international foreign affairs.

This is women's lot. Men are seldom described by their child-bearing capabilities and relationships unless this has salience to the matter at hand. Personally, I'm not anyone's wife, but on the off-chance I ever do anything noteworthy, I'm not sure I want to be a "mother of two". I could be a "single mother" with all the squalor and dysfunction the term implies.

I love my children, but as daughter of a first-wave feminist I don't feel being a mother defines my identity. For all you lot know, I might be a selfish, narcissistic mother who makes my children meet my emotional needs, thus stuffing them up for life.

And for women, the heteronormative assumptions only get worse as you get older. "Sunday breakfast terror for gran". I just picked a random headline after googling the word "gran". Incidentally the "gran" in this story also had an 8-year-old son and, for all we know, she might be a former astronaut, or physicist, or champion juggler.

See, life is more messy, complicated and interesting than our lazy heuristics suggest. (Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to "ease our cognitive load". Problem is these assumptions are not just sloppy, but often quite misleading.)

It is no answer to rely on descriptions of economic status or productivity either: our selfhood is not defined by our achievements. I think it would be cool if you opened the newspaper and everyone was simply described as a human being. "Human being John Key conceded National cannot govern alone."

Maybe not. But I am curious about how we create a sense of self, because of late I'm engaged on a quest to discover who I am.

I know! How did I get to 47 and have no idea who I am! Oh, I don't mean my false self, the mouthy emotional bully (at times); wearer of stupid statement glasses and red lipstick; fractious tart. She exists, but now I am just trying to learn to be - you know - a person.

Just to "be". It's harder than you think. I tried an exercise where I visualised my inner core. Other people imagined theirs like a cave and other organic nature type stuff. I imagined a spa pool made out of bright coloured jewels surrounded by fairy lights. Kitsch! "You're discocore," Erica said. "It's the opposite of normcore."

That's an improvement - sometimes I think my core is just a blank sheet of paper. The thing is, I just want to learn to be a person, not someone hysterically collecting symbols of desirability, building my seduction capital, accomplishing stuff.

It's a paradox: You try so hard to be someone, you end up with a surfeit of self, but conversely, no self at all. The mirror of the online world doesn't help much; everyone has a carefully curated false persona on show.

Yesterday I made a chicken pie from scratch, put fresh sheets on all the beds and danced to Katy Perry with my kids; but no matter how many pictures of pies I post, I never feel like my life really exists in the same way as other people's lovely-looking lives seem to exist when you look at them on Facebook.

But maybe other people feel the same . The only truth I know is, regardless of labels, our authentic selves remain resistant to knowing. Other people's true selves are a mystery to us, as even our own character is a mystery to ourselves. But it seems to me that whoever you want to be (a disco gran?) the important thing is you get to choose.