When I was laid off from my job of 5 years, it allowed me to spend more time with my kids. Now, I'm in a role that puts family first.

• Joshua Meadows was a stay-at-home dad for a few months after being laid off from Enterprise.
• He said he was thankful he could make memories with his family.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Joshua Meadows, a 34-year-old medical sales rep from West Virginia. Meadows asked to keep his current employer anonymous to protect professional relationships, but his employment has been verified by Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

This story is part of "How the Pandemic Changed My Career," an Insider series documenting the moves and moments that shaped people's careers over the past two years.

I worked at Enterprise Holdings for about five years.

I started off there as a management trainee as part of the Enterprise Management Training Program, which includes learning the back end of the business along with other duties.

I climbed the ranks, and at about year two or three, I realized I was really good at and enjoyed doing business-to-business sales.

My goal was to become a business-rental sales executive. This job consists of going to new and previous accounts, setting up corporate rental contracts, and showing them different ways to transport employees. Everything I did at Enterprise was to build a résumé to get myself to that position.

I worked with and shadowed other business-rental sales executives to learn more about the business and how to strengthen my skills. I was open about where I wanted to be in the next five years, and people would offer to help any way they could.

I landed the role after just a few years.

I was really proud of myself, and things were going really well — then the pandemic hit after I was roughly 4 months into this position

Transportation completely stopped. We started having to work from home, and life at Enterprise and my position were completely turned upside down.

I was also hearing that they were starting to get rid of people. Upper management pretty much told me that they were getting rid of my position and a lot of job titles were switching. They wanted me to go back to being a manager at stores that weren't close to home.

It wasn't something I was interested in. I'd already gotten used to being around my family more and the better hours of working 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday as opposed to working over 50 hours a week and being a manager every other weekend. I told them I wanted to stay in something similar to my current role and a little closer to home.

I got a call in the middle of April. They let me finish the month and gave me 2 weeks' notice.

It definitely caught me off guard. To have a position you had worked the past few years to land ripped from you because of the pandemic — something that's out of your control — stunk. But I'm a man of faith. I believe everything happens for a reason. I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy.

I was upset, but I was also excited because I got to spend time with my kids. I had a rainy-day fund. I didn't want to go back to work for a while, and it helped with childcare.

I was also excited because it gave me a chance to hit reset. I gained a lot of skills from Enterprise and learned a lot of things, so I felt like I could stretch my wings a little bit and try to land a better job. I had a really close friend that I'd worked with. She approached me to let me know about the company I now work with. In the meantime, I wanted to take the summer off and just enjoy the kids.

I got to bond with my kids a lot more than I ever had

I got to go to all of their sports games and got to coach, which I never got to do before.

It took me a while to get used to it, but it ended up being great. My wife worked at a bank and because of COVID-19, they were basically alternating shifts. So she would pretty much work Monday, Wednesday, and Friday one week and then Tuesday and Thursday the next.

My biggest wins as a stay-at-home dad were being there to teach my now 3-year-old how to walk and my middle child how to ride a bike, and coach my oldest's baseball team, which went to state.

I just changed my perception of, "I lost my job. What am I going to do?" to, "I'm so thankful I get this opportunity to build these memories with my kids."

I wanted to make sure I took three or four months off and just watched the kids, helped out as much as I could, and was there for them.

Enterprise had definitely done a great job teaching me how to interview and build a strong résumé through classes

Enterprise is also a tough job to land. It took me three interviews over five years to get a job there.

I started looking for jobs in September and was messaged by multiple companies but went after only three jobs, in sales, insurance, and finance. I made it pretty far in the three of them, but my current position was the one I knew was a good fit for me.

I sell reprocessed devices to hospitals and work with them to build reprocessing programs to help eliminate waste. I'm in a job now where it's family-first, and it's fantastic.

One of the biggest challenges for me was coming back to work

You kind of get used to being a stay-at-home dad. If the house was dirty, you had time to clean it. If something needed to be done around the house, you had all the time in the world to get it done.

When I got hired at my current company, it was when the vaccines were starting to roll out, so life was getting back to normal. It was hard to go from having all the time in the world to having structure.

I'd never taken so many pictures in my life as I did during that time off. I'm thankful that during these crazy times, I was able to land a job, especially one where I have a lot more work-life balance and can be around my kids more often.

The advice I have for other parents is to enjoy your kids and make memories. We have the rest of our lives to work. Kids are young for only a limited time.

For job seekers, don't be afraid to fail, and use available resources to prepare. Don't take the first thing you find. Spread out and look at multiple jobs, and see which job and company are the best fit for you and your lifestyle.