Mulling It Over

I am supposed to be sewing crayon rolls right now but I took a little break because I want to write this down:
I had dinner last week with my friend Sue, a great writer and semi-famous NYC journalist. Over a bottle of Rose, Sue helped me figure how to write an essay about being a deaf mother of hearing children. As we passed ideas back and forth, I sometimes said to her "So what?," a question that I used to ask of my students to help them get to the point. But Sue took "So what?" to a whole new level when she shared her professor's version of "So what?," which is "Why would Oprah care?"
In other words, what makes your story compelling and meaningful, what is the hook that will grab your audience? That is what I need to figure out. What exactly is so compelling about being the deaf mother of hearing children? I've got an envelope of jotted-down ideas that hopefully makes sense despite the Rose haze I was in as I wrote it.
More on this later. Back to the sweatshop I go!